Pessoa. Since I’ve Been Me, a stage work built around the poetry of Fernando Pessoa and his heteronyms, opens the Festival de Otoño de la Comunidad de Madrid this Friday. The production, which premiered in Florence in May 2024, is among the final works by American theater director Bob Wilson, who died in 2025 at the age of 83. It will be performed at Teatros del Canal on Friday and Saturday.
Portuguese actress Maria de Medeiros leads the seven-person cast. She has described returning to the production as a responsibility, while noting that Wilson’s meticulous direction makes his presence feel ongoing. During rehearsals, she recalls, he urged her to “always speak upwards,” a direction she says helped give the words greater clarity and weight.
Wilson’s stage language is known for its precise, minimalist visual composition. De Medeiros said he focused intensely on lighting, sometimes spending weeks on a single scene, and wanted performers in makeup and near-final costumes from the first day of rehearsals so he could shape the colors, sound and atmosphere together.
Charles Chemin, the production’s co-director and artistic director of the Watermill Center, said Wilson’s works were intended to remain living creations rather than fixed reproductions. Wilson founded the New York center in 1992 as a space for artistic experimentation across disciplines. Chemin said Wilson opposed reviving past productions simply as repertory, believing they could lose their creative context.
The show brings together Pessoa’s writing in French, Italian, Portuguese and English. Chemin said Wilson’s later work increasingly drew on poetry, which gave him room to develop his own theatrical perspective through free association. De Medeiros sees the production as a meeting of different kinds of poetry, including reflections on mortality and the playful multiplicity of Pessoa’s invented selves.
After the opening production, the festival will present 29 shows from 18 countries across the Community of Madrid through November 29. International participants include Belgian collective tg STAN, the Centre Dramatique National de Montpellier, Cape Verdean choreographer Marlene Monteiro Freitas and Italian dancer Cristiana Morganti.
Sources: El País Cultura.