“By Heart” was part of the Crossing the Line Festival 2025. (Courtesy: Christophe Raynaud de Lage / Festival d’Avignon)
“By Heart,” written and performed by Tiago Rodrigues, is a meditation on memory and community and the powerful role literature plays in how individuals and societies process love, loss, and connection. The show weaves personal grief — Rodrigues’s experience of his grandmother’s decline and death — with collective commemoration through the public act of memorizing a poem.
Guided by Rodrigues, 10 volunteers from the audience stumble through learning Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30, as he intermittently narrates the story of his grandmother, supported by quotations from books that overflow from several wooden crates on the floor of the stage. Part of the Crossing the Line Festival and arranged in collaboration with the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the show becomes a demonstration of the importance of communal memory as preservation: one poem lodged collectively in 10 minds, then in several hundred minds in a theater, becoming a means to safeguard art in an era of permanent ephemerality.
To begin his tale, Rodrigues transports the audience to a small village in Portugal, where he visited his grandmother, Candida, a voracious reader. On one such visit in his youth, he discovered a tape of an interview with the author George Steiner. He became so obsessed with it that he memorized the entire thing and, he said, could, to date, quote it verbatim – and frequently does in the show. One such phrase not only forms the backbone of the show but sums it up perfectly: “We’ve learned in our century that they can take everything away from you …What you carry with you the bastards can’t touch.”
The sonnet Rodrigues taught the volunteers mirrors the show’s preoccupation with how what’s forgotten can be momentarily revived through language. The act of recollection can become an act of love, even when the memories are painful.
Ever the patient instructor, Rodrigues took the participants through the poem line by line, promising that the show would not end until the entire group could recite it by heart, time be damned. His teacherly rhythm and gentle teasing were genuinely charming — the audience laughed at his antics at the Nov. 4 performance, and it felt like audience members were rooting for these strangers to conquer the 14 lines.
“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought, I summon up remembrance of things past,” the 10 people on stage repeated over and over, cued each time by a sharp, exaggerated intake of breath from Rodrigues. As the cycle continued, Rodrigues pulled in other stories about memorization: from the poet Boris Pasternak standing up in Stalinist Russia and saying “30,” prompting 2,000 people to rise and recite the sonnet he had translated; to Adolf Hitler’s ability to draw Vienna’s Ringstrasse from memory.
Yet, not every tangent landed. At nearly two hours, the show runs long, and certain digressions, including an extended passage from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, amid a cascade of literary references, felt like one too many at a moment when the point about memory and literature had already been made.
Once the group had finally mastered the opening quatrain, Rodrigues made their task “easier,” informing them that the remaining 10 lines would be divided, with each participant
responsible for memorizing just one. The metaphorical spotlight – the actual lighting did not fluctuate at all – shifted to each participant as each one faltered, was corrected, and tried again. “Not to worry,” Rodrigues told them; audiences love it when actors mess up. He was right. The small errors elicited sympathetic chuckles because they were human, and that humanity, the repeated efforts rooted in a certain universality, is what made the piece shine.
The story came full circle when Rodrigues recounted that his grandmother began losing her eyesight and was advised by doctors to stop reading to retain some strength. So, she asked him to choose a book for her to commit to memory. Rodrigues read to the audience an old letter he wrote to Steiner seeking advice. His follow-up letter to the author revealed that he picked Shakespeare’s sonnets. On Candida’s 94th birthday, Rodrigues told the audience, he took 10 people to his grandmother’s house and asked her to help them memorize a sonnet. Candida could barely recognize her own grandson, yet slowly she recited the Portuguese translation of Sonnet 30. And then, in the theater, Rodrigues recited those same lines in Portuguese. There was a grandson speaking across language, across time, across memory itself, and the room collectively held its breath, witness to the fragile power of collective memory.
Suddenly, Rodrigues inhaled, and the people on stage instantaneously started to recite the English version. When the last two volunteers reached the closing couplet, they held each other’s gaze and finished the sonnet together, affirming its promise. The themes of “By Heart,” themes of remembrance, loss and the endurance of art seemed to converge in that shared act of recitation: “But if the while I think on thee, dear friend. / All losses are restored, and sorrows end.”
At its best, the show collapses the boundary between private recollection and public, communal remembrance. In that sense, the slightly off-center stage arrangement, with Rodrigues’s stool not perfectly centered, four chairs on one side and six on the other, felt like a kind of visual thesis. It reiterated that, intentional or not, memory is asymmetrical, distributional, shared. This is a show about preserving what matters — not alone, but together.
About the author(s)
Mashael Shah is a culture journalist from Pakistan, currently enrolled in the M.A. Arts and Culture Journalism program at Columbia University. Her interests include the intersection of gender, politics, and culture.