Program

Waking Life is a year-round playground for creation and experimentation, dedicated to being moved. 

Moving spirits with inspiring ideas, moving hips to a spectrum of sound, mouths and ears involved in moving conversations, moving feet through cool lakewater, fingers moving sun-baked soil, planting, sowing, regenerating. Moving pupils absorbing inspiration, reflecting and expanding. Moved brains and moving hands, connecting dots & building bonds. Waking Life seeks to move those who enter its orbit and in turn have them move onward, experimenting, daring, dancing, doing.

The melodious warbler and spotless starling have been filling the air with beautiful music for a long time in Alentejo before humans did. Around the lake, the rhythm of different instruments and sounds from strange machines have conversations. 

Immersive performance confronts, challenges and entertains, stimulating installations tickle fantasies, cinematic projections take eyes on distant journeys, interacting, playing, discovering all that awaits to be discovered while wondering around Waking Life.

Apuro. The spaces for reflection, contemplation, dialogue, learning, feeling, evolving. Ever evolving. We need to pause and deeply listen, to deeply see. To shift perspectives and liberate ourselves from default world conditioning and rigid thought. Bodies and minds are invited to merge, the individual becomes the collective and the kaleidoscope of ideas and skin and words and bones seeks enthusiastic synthesis.

Besides its annual gathering in August, Waking Life hosts residencies, workshops and projects and welcomes volunteers in its community.