Pessoa - Since I've Been Me

In this work, Robert Wilson pays homage to one of the most original figures in 20th-century Modernism. 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.

DIRECTOR, SET DESIGNER AND LIGHTING DESIGNER Robert Wilson

TEXTS Fernando Pessoa

DRAMATURGY Darryl Pinckney

COSTUMES Jacques Reynaud

PERFORMED BY Maria de Medeiros, Aline Belibi, Rodrigo Ferreira, Klaus Martini, Sofia Menci, Gianfranco Poddighe, Janaína Suaudeau

CO-DIRECTOR Charles Chemin

SET DESIGN COLLABORATION WITH Annick Lavallée-Benny

LIGHTING DESIGN COLLABORATION WITH Marcello Lumaca

SOUND DESIGNER AND MUSICAL SUPERVISOR Nick Sagar

MAKE-UP Véronique Pfluger

STAGE MANAGER Thaiz Bozano

TECHNICAL DIRECTOR Enrico Maso

COSTUME COLLABORATION WITH Flavia Ruggeri

LITERARY CONSULTANT Bernardo Haumont

PERSONAL ASSISTANT TO ROBERT WILSON Liam Krumstroh

COMMISSIONED AND PRODUCED BY Teatro della Pergola Firenze and Théâtre de la Ville Parigi

CO-PRODUCTION Teatro Stabile del Friuli Venezia Giulia, Teatro Stabile di Bolzano, Festival d’Automne à Paris and São Luiz Teatro Municipal

IN COLLABORATION WITH Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg

PHOTOGRAPHS Lucie Jansch and Filippo Manzini

Performed in Italian, French, Portuguese and English with Italian surtitles