Tiago Rodrigues - NTGent — No yogurt for the dead

In Tiago Rodrigues ’ No Yogurt for the Dead, the playwright, director, and artistic director of the Festival d’Avignon begins from a true and deeply personal story: that of his father, Rogério Rodrigues, a respected Portuguese journalist. In the final days of his life in hospital, Rogério began writing an article, noting down each day his experience as a terminal patient in a notebook. They both knew it would be his last text. After his death, Tiago opened the notebook and found only a few lines, dots, uncertain marks, almost childlike scribbles. From that void emerges No Yogurt for the Dead: the desire to imagine the pages never written and to give voice to what remained suspended. Blending memories, fragments of writing, songs, Portuguese musical tradition, and intimate confessions, Rodrigues constructs a performance that attempts a small gesture of resistance against the end. Each scene becomes a delicate and ironic variation on the theme of farewell. The stage turns into a surreal landscape, where beds slide across an icy sea and fado becomes a deep echo, collective memory, and a song of longing.