Gonçalo M. Tavares and Vítor Roriz: plural readers of Pessoa

Abstract

This comparatist reflection highlights fundamental features of the staged reading of Fernando Pessoa’s poems in connection with the thought of Gonçalo M. Tavares and the performance of the actor Vítor Roriz in the context of the exhibition "Fernando Pessoa. Plural as the Universe." As a reader and literature lecturer, Gonçalo M. Tavares has reread Pessoa’s poetry focusing on the poet´s distance from things, on irony, humor, language breakdown, determined by the poetics of the other, and on  the mental journey, and has established links with the architecture of Oscar Niemeyer. As Pessoa’s double, Vítor Roriz embodies and vocalizes Pessoa’s poems, according to a polyphony of meanings in an urban space that revisits a futuristic atmosphere. The interconnection between literature and performance has potentiated a new approach to Pessoa’s poetics, based on the pleasure of the text (Barthes), so as to reread, relive and ingrain the poems from the sharing perspective of plural fruition.