By Heart ©Magda Bizarro
By Heart ©Magda Bizarro
From October 12 to October 17, 2021, BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) presents By Heart, a hymn to the power of poetry, memory and freedom by the Portuguese artist Tiago Rodrigues, newly appointed director of the renowned Avignon Festival.
In this performance, Tiago Rodrigues invites 10 audience members to join him in a deeply personal poetic experiment. What appears as a relatively simple task—memorizing a poem—quickly unfolds into something more expansive, as improbable connections emerge between Boris Pasternak, Ray Bradbury, and a cook from the north of Portugal. With curiosity and wit, Rodrigues guides us on a moving journey to illuminate the places forbidden texts have found in our minds and hearts throughout history, as safeguards of humanity no tyrant or government can eradicate.
For, as the French-American literary critic, novelist and philosopher George Steiner once noted “Once 10 people know a poem by heart, there’s nothing the KGB, the CIA or the Gestapo can do about it.”
Buy tickets for BAM Fisher (Fishman Space)
About Tiago Rodrigues
Tiago Rodrigues, newly appointed director of the Avignon Festival, will take office on September 1st, 2022, for a 4-year term, taking over Olivier Py
The first ambition of Portuguese actor and director Tiago Rodrigues is to play with people who'd want to come together and invent shows. His encounter with the tg STAN in 1997, when he was 20, definitively confirmed his attachment to the absence of hierarchy in a creative group. The freedom of performance and decision given to him then would forever influence his future shows. Tiago Rodrigues thus found himself repeatedly and early in his career in a position of instigator, and little by little came to direct and write projects he “stumbled upon.” In parallel to that, he also wrote screenplays, articles, poems, prefaces, op-eds, etc. In 2003, he co-founded with Magda Bizarro the company Mundo Perfeito, with which he created many shows without settling down in any specific location, becoming the guest of many national and international institutions. In France, he notably performed his Portuguese version of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra at the Festival d'Avignon in 2015. By heart was presented in 2014 at the Théâtre de la Bastille, which later invited him to lead an "occupation" of the theater during two months in spring 2016, during which he created Bovary. Director of the Teatro Nacional Dona Maria II in Lisbon since 2014, Tiago Rodrigues nevertheless continues to create shows using the limited means he has appropriated as his own artistic syntax. On a larger scale, he has become a builder of bridges between cities and countries, at once host and advocate of a living theatre.
About BAM
BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) is a multi-arts center located in Brooklyn, New York. For more than 150 years, BAM has been the home for adventurous artists, audiences, and ideas—engaging both global and local communities. With world-renowned programming in theater, dance, music, opera, film, and much more, BAM showcases the work of emerging artists and innovative modern masters.
