Program Notes for TIAGO RODRIGUES: By Heart
Tiago Rodrigues
By Heart
October 28–29, 2025
McGuire Theater
Tiago Rodrigues: By Heart
Written, directed, and performed by Tiago Rodrigues
English translation by Tiago Rodrigues; revised by Joana Frazão
Extracts and quotations from William Shakespeare, Ray Bradbury, George Steiner, and Joseph Brodsky
Scenography, costumes, and props: Magda Bizarro
General Manager: Malounine Buard
Executive production: Festival d’Avignon
Based on an original creation by the company Mundo Perfeito
Coproduction: O Espaço do Tempo, Maria Matos Teatro Municipal
Support: Camões Centre culturel portugais à Paris for the 77th edition of the Festival d’Avignon
Support for creation: Governo de Portugal – DGArtes
Executive production of the original creation: Magda Bizarro and Rita Mendes
By Heart premiered November 20, 2013, at Teatro Maria Matos, Lisbon (Portugal)
Tonight’s performance runs 90–120 minutes with no intermission.
Please join us before and after the performance in the Walker’s Cityview Bar.
Accessibility Notes
For more information about accessibility, visit our Access page.
For questions on accessibility, content and sensory notes or to request additional accommodations, call 612-253-3556 or email access@walkerart.org.
About By Heart
“As you can see, there are ten empty chairs on the stage. I’d like for ten spectators to come sit on them. Before you accept my invitation enthusiastically, I need to add that those ten spectators will have to learn a text by heart. It’s a short text, not too difficult, but not too simple, either. It’s a manageable text. Those ten spectators won’t have to act. They won’t have to do anything in particular. Everything will be calm and normal.”
For the past ten years, Portuguese playwright and actor Tiago Rodrigues has offered By Heart, a heartrending show that was created in 2013 as the result of a request from his grandmother as she was going blind to find a book to learn by heart. Using a sonnet by William Shakespeare and the writings of George Steiner, Boris Pasternak, or Ray Bradbury, the Portuguese artist offers a true dramatic manifesto to say the power of poetry through the creation of an unexpected community.
While teaching the poem to audience members on stage, Rodrigues unfolds a mix of stories of his soon-to-be-blind grandmother and stories of writers and characters from books that are, somehow, connected both to the old lady and himself. The books are also there, on stage, inside wooden fruit crates. And as each couple of verses is taught to the group of ten people, improbable connections emerge between Nobel Prize winner Boris Pasternak, a cook from the north of Portugal and a Dutch TV program called Beauty and Consolation, and the mystery behind the choice of this poem is slowly solved.
Exploring the relationship between politics and literature, history and the personal, By Heart becomes a gesture of love.
Learn More
Featured on the Walker Reader: Tiago Rodrigues: A Theater of Consequence, by Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento
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Interview with Tiago Rodrigues
This interview was conducted by Marc Blanchet during the 77th edition of the Festival d’Avignon; translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach, February 2023.
Since its creation in 2013, your show By Heart has been touring the world. Can you tell us how it came to be?
The starting point was autobiographical, even genealogical. Ever since my childhood in Portugal, I’ve always had a very strong link with my grandmother. It expresses itself in our shared love for books and for reading. As she grew older, my grandmother learned that she was going blind. So she gave me a mission: to choose a book for her to learn by heart before losing her sight completely. As soon as she told me about it, I knew that, one day, I would share that story. I didn’t know how it would end then.
I just had the intuition that it was a major event in my own life, that it said something about the essence of my approach to theatre, by bringing together questions about the job of the actor and this love for reading.
In By Heart, your grandmother is a sort of central character, alongside authors from different times and places…
My grandmother was raised and lived in a secluded village, away from the world of knowledge. Which was a sort of double solitude. It’s the village of my childhood. By asking the audience to learn a poem by heart, I’m proposing to perpetuate my grandmother’s act, to perpetuate her voice. She only left her village twice in her life, but since the creation of my show, she’s visited several continents, for over 350 performances! She was still alive when the show was created. I was in France the night she passed away. I thought about stopping the tour, but there were still a few dates left. I left for Madrid, thinking the show would be meaningless, that it would be too violent a shock to even perform… But something of her act of reading, of her filial love, survived. The play became a metaphor for our mutual love. Although I perform it less often these days, every time I do, I feel her presence, and I see how much By Heart continues to be meaningful for the audience. It’s the only show for which I’ve continued to appear on stage as an actor since 2015. […] It’s about sharing my vision of the world with the audience, the artists, and my team, during this magical moment that is the Festival d’Avignon.
In By Heart, several writers gather around a sonnet by William Shakespeare: Boris Pasternak, Ossip Mandelstam, Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury, or George Steiner, who passed away in 2020…
Over the course of the play, I try to lead the audience, or rather to lose them, in a literary labyrinth. This labyrinth is a reflection of the research I had to do to accomplish the terrible but wonderful mission that was choosing a final book for my grandmother. Lost in this maze, I was on my way back from her house when I remembered that interview I’d discovered when I was with Belgian company tg Stan, with which I almost took my first steps as an actor. On the set of a Dutch TV show, Win Kayzer was interviewing intellectual George Steiner. Among many anecdotes, recollections, readings, and reflections, Steiner explained how learning a text by heart is an act of love for the authors. I then decided to write to that great intellectual, a story I tell in my show…
By Heart is an experience, the creation of an unexpected community as the show almost “invents itself” right before our eyes…
There are ten chairs on the stage. The show can only begin once ten spectators are sitting in those chairs, with me as the eleventh. Those ten people slowly transform thanks to literature. The effort to learn by heart becomes visible. I see the idea that to learn a poem by heart might create a momentary community but also a real collective as a love letter to the transformative power of theatre, but not a proof of it. Ever since I started performing this show, I’ve never once felt like I was repeating myself or growing tired of it as an actor. It’s about experiencing something together, without anything to domesticate those ten participants. Each of them realizes as the show unfolds that their learning this sonnet by heart comes with some responsibility. By Heart is something of a collective challenge, which I always experience in its mixture of vulnerability and freshness. Learning a poem allows us to experience the unpredictable nature of the theatrical act. And to see, as we so rarely can, the exercise of memory in the process of being created, thanks to the power of poetry.
By Heart plays a key part in your evolution as an artist. Isn’t it a sort of self-portrait, through the memorization of a sonnet by William Shakespeare?
In this show, several different layers come together: poetry, theatre, the freedom of expression of authors faced with totalitarian regimes. Learning something by heart isn’t a political project. However, it can be a tool of resistance, both literary and biological, against aging. In any case, it’s proof that there is a future, as it has been and still is in our most desperate moments. Many people who know my work could jokingly say: “If you see Tiago Rodrigues’s By Heart, you don’t have to see anything else, everything’s in there!” Maybe it’s true! If I had to give a historical dimension to my passport, it would be By Heart. In this show, you’ll find all the necessary information I need to be allowed to cross a border. It brings together all the questions I ask myself and is an expression of the way I think about theatre. I agree with Heiner Müller when he says that theatre allows us to communicate with the dead. During every performance, I enter in a conversation with Ray Bradbury, Boris Pasternak, but also my grandmother and my father. And I’m lucky enough to be able to work with William Shakespeare. It’s a two-lane transmission. The first is invisible, though almost palpable: it’s my grandmother’s gesture, who “imprinted” in me this love for books. It’s also true of a scholar like George Steiner. That first transmission comes from our ancestors, alive or dead, through literary works or not. The second transmission is directed towards the audience, towards other generations. And then there’s this relationship of vulnerability which requires a complicity with the spectators, both on stage and in the room. It’s the very essence of my work, that is, the belief in the unpredictability, in the very real but very fortunate danger of theatre. I’m looking for it, triggering it, so that there can exist a great freedom on stage. Which I do through a deep admiration for the text and the unlikely marriage between respect for the writing and the freedom of the actor. This instability means that By Heart may or may not go well. It’s a different experience with each “performance.”
About Tiago Rodrigues
Born in Amadora (Portugal), in 1977, Tiago Rodrigues is an actor, director, playwright, producer and currently Director of the Festival d’Avignon, in France.
Since he started as an actor, 25 years ago, Rodrigues has always looked at the theatre as a human assembly: a place where people meet, like in a cafe, to confront their thoughts and share their time.
In 1997, when he was still a student, he started to work with the company tg STAN, co-creating and performing shows in English and French, in more than 15 countries. When he first started working with this Belgian collective, the freedom he found would forever influence his future works, confirming his attachment to the absence of hierarchy in a creative group.
He co-founded with Magda Bizarro in 2003 the theatre company Mundo Perfeito where, for 11 years, he created and presented more than 30 performances in more than 20 countries, becoming a regular presence in festivals like Festival d’Automne à Paris, METEOR Festival in Norway, Theaterformen in Germany, Festival TransAmériques in Canada, kunstenfestivalsdesarts in Belgium, among others. He collaborated with a large number of Portuguese and international theatre artists, as well as choreographers and dancers.
He also taught theatre in several schools such as the contemporary dance school PARTS, in Brussels, directed by choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, the Swiss performing arts school Manufacture, the international project École des Maîtres and Portuguese schools, such as the University of Évora, ESMAE, Ballesteatro or the Higher School of Dance, in Lisbon. He directed research, training and experimentation projects. Parallel to his theatre work, he wrote screenplays for film and television, pieces for newspapers, poetry, and essays.
During the past years, he obtained international recognition and several national and international awards. Some of his most notable works are By Heart (2013), Antony and Cleopatra (2014), Bovary (2014), and Sopro (2017). He maintained his collaborative work in projects like The way she dies (2019), that he wrote for the tg STAN, and Please Please Please (2019), co-created with the choreographers La Ribot and Mathilde Monnier. His most recent works are Catarina and the beauty of killing fascists (2020), The Cherry Orchard (2021), his first staging of a repertoire text that premiered at the Cour d’Honneur of Palais des Papes during the Festival d’Avignon 2021, Lovers’ Choir (2021), Dans la mesure de l’impossible (2022), created at the Comédie de Genève, and Hecuba, not Hecuba (2024), created with Comédie-Française.
By either mixing true stories and fiction, rewriting classics, or adapting novels, the theatre of Tiago Rodrigues is deeply rooted in the idea of writing for and with the actors, searching for a poetical transformation of reality through theatrical tools. That desire is evident in projects such as Occupation Bastille (2016), an artistic occupation of Théâtre de la Bastille, in Paris, by almost a hundred artists and spectators.
In 2018 he was awarded XV Europe Prize Theatrical Realities. In April 2019 he was distinguished by the French Republique with the title Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters), and in December of the same year, he received the Prémio Pessoa, the most prestigious award for arts and science in Portugal. In December 2021 the Portuguese Government has distinguished him with the Medal of Cultural Merit.
He was Artistic Director of the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II in Lisbon for seven years, between 2015 and 2021, developing a project of artistic renewal of this centenary institution and an important work of democratization, public renovation, and circulation throughout the national and international territory. He has been the Director of Festival d’Avignon, in France, since September 2022.
Rodrigues’ work has been recognized by his ability to break borders between the theatre and different realities, challenging our perception of social and historical phenomenon. Throughout his career, Tiago Rodrigues has become a builder of bridges between cities and countries, at once host and advocate of a living theatre.
Living Land Acknowledgment
The McGuire Theater and Walker Art Center are located on the contemporary, traditional, and ancestral homelands of the Dakota people. Situated near Bde Maka Ska and Wíta Tópa Bde, or Lake of the Isles, on what was once an expanse of marshland and meadow, this site holds meaning for Dakota, Ojibwe, and Indigenous people from other Native nations, who still live in the community today.
We acknowledge the discrimination and violence inflicted on Indigenous peoples in Minnesota and the Americas, including forced removal from ancestral lands, the deliberate destruction of communities and culture, deceptive treaties, war, and genocide. We recognize that, as a museum in the United States, we have a colonial history and are beneficiaries of this land and its resources. We acknowledge the history of Native displacement that allowed for the founding of the Walker. By remembering this dark past, we recognize its continuing harm in the present and resolve to work toward reconciliation, systemic change, and healing in support of Dakota people and the land itself.
We honor Native people and their relatives, past, present, and future. As a cultural organization, the Walker works toward building relationships with Native communities through artistic and educational programs, curatorial and community partnerships, and the presentation of new work.
Acknowledgments
To learn more about upcoming performances, visit 2025/26 Walker Performing Arts Season.