Tiago Rodrigues

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 tg STAN in 1997, when he was but 20, definitively confirmed his attachment to the absence of hierarchy in a creative group. 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” was presented in 2014 at the Théâtre de la Bastille, which later invited him to lead an ‘occupation’ of the theater during two months in spring 2016, during which he created “Bovary.”

Director of the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II in Lisbon from 2015 to 2021, Tiago Rodrigues nevertheless continues 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 theater. After being 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 his post in September 2022. His first edition at the Festival d’Avignon closed with “By Heart” in the Cour d’honneur du Palais des Papes, on July 25, 2023.