NO YOGURT FOR THE DEAD - HISTOIRE(S) DU THÉÂTRE VI
What if theatre could win over death? With ‘No Yogurt for the Dead’, world famous director Tiago Rodrigues attempts to imagine his father’s last words.
Makers
Tiago Rodrigues & NTGent
Premiere
January 23, 2025, NTGent (Ghent, Belgium)
Synopsis
In No Yogurt for the Dead, Tiago Rodrigues, artistic director at Festival d’Avignon, takes inspiration from a true story about his father. Rogério Rodrigues, a respected Portuguese journalist started writing a newspaper article in his final days in the hospital. Every day, his father would write in his notebook to prepare this text about his experiences as a terminal patient. Both Tiago and his father knew this would be his final article.
Upon his father’s passing, Tiago Rodrigues opened the notebook of his father. It contained only a few lines and dots, a few scribbles, like the abstract drawings of a toddler. Now, Rodrigues aims to imagine the unwritten pages of his father's last work. Mixing memories, songs or fragments of his father’s writings, Rodrigues builds a performance that wishes to be a small victory over death.
After Miet Warlop, Angélica Liddell, Tim Etchells, Faustin Linyekula and Milo Rau, Tiago Rodrigues is yet another celebrated director that is invited by NTGent to take part in the prestigious Histoire(s) du Théâtre series.
In his installment, each scene is a playful variation on the theme of farewell. The stage forms a surreal landscape where hospital beds glide across an icy sea, as a metaphor for life's tumult. With music and poetry as the grammar of a theatre that finds reasons for joy even in the saddest of stories.
Credits
The cast of this performance includes Lisah Adeaga, Manuela Azevedo, Beatriz Brás, and Hélder Gonçalves.
Co-producers are e.g. Culturgest Lisboa, Wiener Festwochen and Piccolo Teatro di Milano - Teatro d'Europa.
Scène Images
The press on this performance:
⭐ ‘Rodrigues’ dramaturgical craft at full display’
--- New York Times (US)
⭐ ‘This is the story of a play that breathes life into death and turns disappointment into wonder. A story that is true and unique, universal because it is personal; a story that concerns us all’
--- Libération (FR)
⭐ ‘Rodrigues captures dying in all its dramatic potfulness. The gentleness with which he does so is balm on the soul’
--- De Morgen (BE)
⭐ ‘A wonderful story (...) The performance by musician Helder Gonçalves, and the actresses and their crystal-clear voices, is matchless’
--- Theaterkrant (NL)
Interview
Trailer
A letter from Tiago
It was autumn
Rogério Rodrigues had gone into hospital for the last time
He knew that the grape harvest
in the distant village where he was born
in Trás-os-Montes, in north-east Portugal
was coming to an end
He also knew he wouldn’t drink the wine from this harvest
He was 418 km away from his village
here in Amadora-Sintra hospital, in a bleak suburb of Lisbon
But the problem wasn’t distance, it was time
The distance was precise
Time was uncertain
Like the grape harvest, Rogério was coming to an end
***
When my father Rogério Rodrigues was in hospital in the last weeks of his life, he asked me to bring a notebook and a pen. He told me he wanted to write a final article after a 40-year career as a journalist. Writing articles as a way of dying.
My father wanted to report on his experiences in hospital. About the people and movements he saw in the clinic and how it felt to lie there, degenerated from human to patient. He wanted to write about that place where people are treated as if they were no longer there while they still are. He already had a title and wrote it right on the first page: The dead don't eat yoghurt. My father had hated yoghurt all his life, but now it was part of his daily diet at the hospital, and he grew 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.
***
Just scribbles
Nothing more, except the title
Not a single word
Nothing resembling a letter
Scratches, scribbles, strokes
Scrambled lines
Like the marks children make before they can draw
Lines drawn by a weakened hand
A hand that imagined that it was writing, but was not
A hand that could no longer form letters
A useless hand
***
For weeks, months and years, I flicked through the pages of the notebook. The scribbles were like a picture of powerlessness. Drawings of the end. What might my father have been trying to write?
Then I decided to write a play. Maybe making theatre is my way of living. To give meaning to something thas has no meaning. A play imagining the last words my father would have written.
***
This play is an imagined report
Sometimes we show things on stage that happened
Sometimes we show things that are made up
Sometimes a thing that really happened will seem to be made up
Sometimes something made up will seem to be real
This imagined report plays out on the border
between life and death
between reality and fiction
between journalism and theatre
In this play Rogério has a different name: Longbeard
To avoid confusion
The elder son will be Shortbeard
The play starts like this
“No Yoghurt for the Dead”
A report by Longbeard
Correspondent in Amadora-Sintra hospital
About '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, former 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 and tragedy. Liebestod premiered on the Festival d’Avignon in July 2021.
The Belgian artist Miet Warlop created Histoire(s) du Théâtre IV. ONE SONG (photo) was one of the revelations of the Festival d'Avignon in July 2022 and is touring Europe since. British theatre legend Tim Etchells premiered How goes the World - Histoire(s) du Théâtre V in November 2023 on the brink of the fortieth birthday of his legendary collective Forced Entertainment.
Biography Tiago Rodrigues
The first ambition of Portuguese actor and director Tiago Rodrigues was to play with people who'd want to come together and invent shows. His encounter with the Belgian company tg Stan in 1997, when he was only 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, Rodrigues 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 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 continued to create shows using the limited means he has appropriated as his own artistic syntax. On a larger scale, he became 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 took up this post in September 2022.
CONTACT
❔ Are you interested in programming this performance? Please contact Sophie Vanden Broeck, sales manager at NTGent:
✉: sophie.vanden.broeck@ntgent.be
☎: +32 485 80 38 43
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