ROBERT WILSON
Pressoa - Since I’ve been me
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Fernando Pessoa’s poetry is a quest, a deep interrogation of language as existence. His inventiveness famously expressed itself as the cultivation and release of the multiple selves waiting for him in his head. They were not pseudonyms. They were him but also not him. Pessoa called them heteronyms. They were his allies in a great adventure, the search for the liberated voice of poetry. This production evokes the various atmospheres of Pessoa’s works, the fluidity of mood, whether meditative or comic, rational or anarchic, that rose from a life shared with heteronymic personalities such as Alexander Search or Bernardo Soares or Vicente Guedes or Alberto Caeiro or Alvaro de Campos or Ricardo Reis. Wilson’s freedom of image is an equivalent to these cheerful and grave skeptics of the metaphysical. He presents Pessoa and his coterie as escapists from traditional philosophical concepts. Wilson is as alive as Pessoa to the reality of dreams and the unreliability of the concrete. Emotions and sensations are mysteries. The strengths of Pessoa’s poetic imagination are in his will to write and to go on writing against doubt and in his extraordinary ability to do so in one language after another. To capture the essence of the human soul’s relation to the physical world is a music of inquiry.
DATES
Florence Teatro della Pergola May 4 – 12, 2024
Paris Théâtre de la Ville November 5 – 16, 2024
Trento Teatro Sociale February 6 – 9 , 2025
Trieste Politeama Rossetti February 13 – 16, 2025
Lisbon Teatro São Luz March 6 – 8, 2025
Luxembourg Grand Théâtre January 9 – 10, 2026
Paris Théâtre de la Ville June 13 – 21, 2026
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Direction, set and lighting design Robert Wilson
Texts Fernando Pessoa
Dramaturgy Darryl Pinckney
Costumes Jacques Reynaud
With Maria de Medeiros, Aline Belibi, Rodrigo Ferreira, Klaus Martini, Sofia Menci, Gianfranco
Poddighe, Janaína Suaudeau
Co-director Charles Chemin
Associate set designer Annick Lavallée-Benny
Associate light designer Marcello Lumaca
Sound design and music supervisor Nick Sagar
Make up Véronique Pfluger
Stage manager Thaiz Bozano
Technical director Enrico Maso
Collaboration to costumes design Flavia Ruggeri
Literary consultant Bernardo Haumont
Personal assistant to Robert Wilson Liam Krumstroh
Commissioned and produced by Teatro della Pergola Firenze & Théâtre de la Ville Parigi
Coproduced by Teatro Stabile del Friuli Venezia Giulia, Teatro Stabile di Bolzano, São Luiz
Teatro Municipal de Lisboa, Festival d’Automne à Paris
In collaboration with Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg
Photography © Lucie Jansch