PESSOA—Since I’ve Been Me
by Robert Wilson, with texts by Fernando Pessoa
Performed in Italian, French, Portuguese and English
Costumes by Jacques Reynaud; Dramaturgy by Darryl Pinckney
Commissioned by Teatro della Pergola (Florence, Italy) and Théâtre de la Ville (Paris, France)
World Première on May 2, 2024 at the Teatro della Pergola, Florence, Italy
Performed in Italian, French, Portuguese and English
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.