NO YOGURT FOR THE DEAD - HISTOIRE(S) DU THÉÂTRE VI

When my father was in hospital, in the last weeks of his life, knowing he would die, he was visited regularly by a woman called Teresa. She was a volunteer at the hospital, who spent time just talking to people, fighting the loneliness of those who are ill. When I came to visit, my father would tell me about her. I later discovered that Teresa is the actress Teresa Faria, whom I know very well. It was Teresa who told me this. I met her once at the national theatre in Lisbon, where she shared her memories of the conversations with my father during his last weeks in the hospital.

One of the times I visited my father at the hospital, he asked me to bring a notebook and a pen. He told me he wanted to write a book about his experiences in the hospital. He already had a title, that he immediately wrote on the first page of the notebook I brought him: No Yogurt for the Dead. He had hated yogurt all his life, but now it was part of his daily diet at the hospital and he was growing to like it.

After my father died, I opened the notebook to read what he had written, but there were only some lines and spots. Scribbles, like the abstract drawings of a baby. I suppose he tried to write, but his hand was too fragile. Maybe he thought he was writing, in a dream-like state, but nothing really  came out.

Teresa told me that he would talk about the book all the time. He wanted to mix his experience of being hospitalised (with a terminal illness) and memories of his life, especially some stories about his work as a journalist. Teresa recalled a few of the stories my father had told her, stories he wished to include in the book, but for which he didn’t have the forces or the lucidity to write anymore.

That’s when I decided to write No Yogurt for the Dead, imagining the book that my father would have written. However, I will do so in the form of a theatre performance, inviting Teresa Faria to play herself in the role of the volunteer. The volunteer who listens to the stories of a  man who is about to die, and talks about the book that he will not write.

One of the true stories that my father shared with Teresa was about another actress also called Teresa. It was the coincidence of the names that sparked my father’s memory. One of the first articles for a newspaper that made my father quite well known in Portuguese journalism was written in 1975. This article told the story of Teresa Torga, an obscure actress and fado singer with mental health problems that undressed and walked around naked, reciting poems and singing, in one of Lisbon’s most crowded streets, during a demonstration. When this episode took place, a photojournalist started to take pictures of her but the people in the street revolted and started covering the woman, protecting her from the sensationalist her ephemeral glory as musical comedy star, and to denounce António Capela, the sensationalist photographer that tried to take advantage of the situation and was stopped by the people in the street.

This article published in Diário de Lisboa, an already extinct daily newspaper, was read by one of the most famous musicians in Portugal. Zeca Afonso was persecuted during dictatorship and was the most important protest singer in the country. When he read this article, he composed the song Teresa Torga, that became a feminist hymn in Portugal.

Of course, I knew very well this story of Teresa Torga and wasn’t surprised that my father had shared it with Teresa Faria during her visits at the hospital. I remember my father having said many times that it would be a great starting point for a novel. Once he even told me I should think of doing a theatre performance about it.

I suggest that No yogurt for the dead could be based on the story of Teresa Torga remembered in a hospital bed and told to another actress also called Teresa. I suggest that I can collaborate artistically with my father for the first time in my life, imagining a performance about the book he wasn’t able to write anymore. I suggest that Teresa Faria can be the main actress of a musical comedy, in the style of the shows where Teresa Torga stared, composed by her memories of the conversations with my father.

The actress Teresia Faria, who volunteers at the hospital where my father died

About the series 'Histoire(S) Du Théâtre'

After Milo Rau, Faustin Linyekula, Angélica Liddell, Miet Warlop and Tim Etchells, Tiago Rodrigues creates a new episode – the sixth – of the acclaimed NTGent series Histoire(s) du Théâtre.

Histoire(s) du Théâtre is a series of new productions commissioned by NTGent, the city theatre of Ghent. The title refers to the documentaries Histoire(s) du Cinéma by the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, in which he gave the film audience an overview of the key moments in the history of European cinema. Inspired by his generous example, NTGent invites a director to reflect on theatre as an art form.

The series was launched by Milo Rau, artistic director of NTGent, with La Reprise –
Histoire(s) du Théâtre I. This show was first performed at the KunstenfestivaldesArts in Brussels in May 2018 and has since toured globally. The renowned Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula then created Histoire(s) du Théâtre II, including a re-enactment of a famous dance performance from the 1970s by the Congolese National Ballet, with some of the original performers. Third in line was the Spanish director Angélica Liddell. In Liebestod - Histoire(s) du Théâtre III, Liddell herself was on stage, exploring her fundamental ideas about theatre, tragedy and its importance. This show premiered on the Festival d’Avignon in July 2021. The Belgian artist Miet Warlop created Histoire(s) du Théâtre IV. ONE SONG was one of the absolute revelations of the Festival d'Avignon in July 2022 and is touring Europe since. Tim Etchells is currently creating How goes the World, Sir, Now? - Histoire(s) du Théâtre V, which will première in November 2023. The sixth instalment No Yogurt for the Dead - Histoire(s) du Théâtre VI by Tiago Rodrigues shall premiere in season 24-25.

Biography

The first ambition of Portuguese actor Tiago Rodrigues is to play with people who'd want to come together and invent shows. His encounter with the Belgian company STAN in 1997, when he was but 20, definitively confirmed his attachment to the absence of hierarchy in a creative group. He would develop his acting, his dramatic writing, and his taste for the collective. The freedom of performance and decision given 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 is presented in 2014 at the Théâtre de la Bastille, which later invites him to lead an "occupation" of the theatre during two months in spring 2016, during which he created Bovary. As the director of the Teatro Nacional Dona Maria II in Lisbon from 2015 to 2021, Tiago Rodrigues nevertheless continued 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. He was appointed as the future director of the Festival d'Avignon in July 2021, while presenting Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard in the Cour d'Honneur du Palais des papes. He has taken up this post in September 2022.