Tiago Rodrigues speaks in an interview with The Korea Herald in Seoul on Wednesday. (SPAF)
Portuguese playwright, director and actor Tiago Rodrigues credit his deep love of literature with inspiring his iconic theater piece “By Coronary heart.”
Rodrigues, creative director of the Avignon Competition in France, grew to become the primary non-French artist to guide one of many greatest performing arts festivals on this planet because it was based by Jean Vilar in 1947.
Visiting Seoul for the second time — his first go to was as a programmer for the Seoul Performing Arts Competition — Rodrigues brings his famend work “By Coronary heart” to SPAF this weekend, providing audiences an emotional, literary journey.
“By Coronary heart” can be carried out from Friday to Sunday on the Quad Theater in Daehagno. The efficiency can be delivered in each English and Korean, with subtitles in each languages.
“By Coronary heart” (SPAF)
It’s fairly in contrast to some other theater piece. Rodrigues takes middle stage and invitations 10 viewers members to the stage to be taught a poem by coronary heart with him, reworking the straightforward act of memorization right into a deeply private and communal expertise.
The piece is an autobiographical one, in keeping with the 47-year-old director, fulfilling a request from his grandmother when was going blind.
“My grandmother was just about in love with literature though she did not have a whole lot of research and she or he was a cook dinner in a small village all her life. Our connection was very robust by way of literature. It was due to my grandmother that I fell in love with books and studying after I was a baby,” stated Rodrigues in an interview with a bunch of reporters Wednesday in Seoul.
All through his life, his grandmother launched him to books, and as she grew older, he grew to become the one bringing books to her. When she was 93, the medical doctors instructed her she was going blind. So she determined to be taught a e book by coronary heart and requested Rodrigues to decide on the e book for her.
“So my mission was how will you select the final e book for somebody you like and the one e book she can have in her thoughts and she is going to learn for the remainder of her life?”
“By Coronary heart” (SPAF)
The ten volunteers from the viewers who haven’t any prior information of which poem they’ll be taught be part of Rodrigues on stage.
As he teaches every verse, he weaves in tales “like a labyrinth” — of his soon-to-be-blind grandmother, of writers and characters from books, of literary greats like Boris Pasternak, critic George Steiner and a cook dinner from the north of Portugal and a Dutch TV program known as “Magnificence and Comfort.”
Rodrigues highlighted the sudden connections and sense of “political” collectiveness that spark on stage when individuals memorize a poem collectively.
“Studying a poem is like saying to this textual content that you just’re in love with it. So it is an act of affection. However whenever you do it collectively it turns into an act of resistance in opposition to dying, in opposition to blindness, in opposition to the political regime, in opposition to censorship.”
The universality of “By Coronary heart” transcends languages. Although Rodrigues speaks Portuguese, French, English and Spanish, he all the time teaches the sonnet within the language of the nation the place he’s performing. For Korean audiences, he plans to show the poem in Korean.
“The fantastic thing about it’s that the individuals studying the sonnet will say it significantly better than me, however I do know it,” he stated. “There’s a connection that occurs that goes past the problem of language. And there’s one thing in regards to the energy of making an attempt to translate, making an attempt to know the opposite, which is extraordinarily vital these days in theater but additionally in society.”