By Heart

In By Heart, the Portuguese director and director of the Festival d'Avignon tells us the story of his grandmother, now blind, who asks her grandson to choose a book for her to learn by heart. But what exactly does it mean to ‘learn a text by heart’? And how can we, with the audience, get as close as possible to this question, to its urgency, to its charge?

By inviting ten spectators onto the stage each evening to perform this act, Tiago Rodrigues is not content to blur the boundaries between theatre, fiction and reality. He invites men and women, Shakespeare's ‘Sonnet Platoon 30’, to experience, for the duration of the performance, a singular experience: that of retaining a text and saying it on stage. An act of resistance and struggle against time, oblivion, ageing, absence or disappearance. A moving gesture, as intimate as it is political.