Theatre de Palha returns, after a one-year hiatus, shaped by a simple question: what do we do with what weighs upon us? With the weight of memories, stories, affections, objects, landscapes and time itself.

Made of straw, light, wind and night, this ephemeral theatre rises once again in Aljezur as a place of encounter and transformation. For a few weeks, artists and audiences share music, films, meals, moving bodies and stories from different geographies, perhaps searching for ways to carry together what the world so often makes difficult to bear alone.

Within this programme are figures on the run, children discovering the world, displaced communities, objects that come to life, musicians crossing cultures and human landscapes marked by memory and resistance. There are concerts where rhythms merge like living territories, films that question the political and ecological violence of the present, and performances where humour, absurdity and tenderness become ways of carrying on.

The film programme, curated by Candela Varas, once again runs through this edition. From the unsettling futures of "Arco" to the political memories of "O Agente Secreto" passing through the pacifist call of John Lennon and Yoko Ono in "One to One: John & Yoko", these films propose different ways of looking at the world and at what remains profoundly human within it.

The Orquestra do Algarve restores to Buster Keaton’s silent cinema the old dialogue between image and live music. Terrakota and the Orquestra de Jazz do Algarve remind us that music can be a place of crossing, mixture and freedom. In "400 grammes pour un repas partagé", cooking and eating become a collective artistic gesture. And in "Chão de Meninos", childhood reappears as a force of imagination capable of reinventing space and the world. Theatre, dance and contemporary circus bring us bodies out of balance, humour, poetry and strange forms of beauty, as in "Par le Boudu", "Barolosoul’O" and "People".

Built once again with the complicity of local farmers and imagined by Pedro Quintela, Theatre de Palha continues to affirm itself as a sensitive and temporary architecture where art, territory and community meet - perhaps to remind us that what weighs upon us can also be danced, sung, shared and transformed into a collective experience.


— Lavrar o Mar