Tiago Rodrigues / NTGent

What if theatre could win over death? With ‘No Yogurt for the Dead’, world famous director Tiago Rodrigues attempts to imagine his father’s last words.

In No Yogurt for the Dead, Tiago Rodrigues, artistic director at Festival d’Avignon, takes inspiration from a true story about his father. Rogério Rodrigues, a respected Portuguese journalist started writing a newspaper article in his final days in the hospital. Every day, his father would write in his notebook to prepare this text about his experiences as a terminal patient. Both Tiago and his father knew this would be his final article.

Upon his father’s passing, Tiago Rodrigues opened the notebook of his father. It contained only a few lines and dots, a few scribbles, like the abstract drawings of a toddler. Now, Rodrigues aims to imagine the unwritten pages of his father's last work. Mixing memories, songs or fragments of his father’s writings, Rodrigues builds a performance that wishes to be a small victory over death.

After Miet Warlop, Angélica Liddell, Tim Etchells, Faustin Linyekula and Milo Rau, Tiago Rodrigues is yet another celebrated director that is invited by NTGent to take part in the prestigious Histoire(s) du Théâtre series.

In his installment, each scene is a playful variation on the theme of farewell. The stage forms a surreal landscape where hospital beds glide across an icy sea, as a metaphor for life's tumult. With music and poetry as the grammar of a theatre that finds reasons for joy even in the saddest of stories.