Portuguese actor Tiago Rodrigues’ first ambition is to collaborate with people who want to come together and invent shows. His early encounter with the Antwerp-based theater collective tg STAN in 1997, when he was only 20, confirmed a commitment to the absence of hierarchy in creative work. The liberating performance style and flexibility given to him then continues to influence his work today.
Rodrigues thus found himself repeatedly and early in his career in a position of initiator, 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 and Magda Bizarro co-founded the company Mundo Perfeito, which 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 allowed 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, Rodrigues 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. Following his appointment in July 2021, whilst he was presenting Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in the Cour d’honneur of the palais des Papes, he took over the direction of the Festival d’Avignon in September 2022. He continues to helm the festival he knows well, having presented Antony and Cleopatra there in 2015, Sopro in 2017, The Cherry Orchard in 2021, By Heart, Dans la mesure de l’impossible in 2023 and La Distance in 2025.
