The future, as we know, is neither unidirectional nor linear. This edition of the Gil Vicente Festivals will embrace this idea, aiming to provoke ways of engaging with some of the essential issues of our time.

If this current social landscape, which so greatly fragments and shatters our sensory field, can be represented and put into perspective for reflective experience by one of the arts of our time... then surely one of those avenues is theater.

We've curated a program that asserts the need to observe, live, and understand many small natures that change at the speed with which reality interferes with our senses and concepts.

On stage, we'll encounter an aesthetic, poetic, and political richness proposed by a new creative generation, which boldly takes on the task of questioning human existence and its social habits.

In collaboration with the artistic direction of Teatro Oficina, the Gil Vicente Festivals also propose, within their program, a relevant dimension of thought and education, assembled with protagonists who are part of the strong generational cast present in this edition.

Navigating through various themes, different geographies, and new places of expression, we'll bring to the forefront some of the most unsettling, critical, and creative forms that contemporary theater offers us, in an attempt to interpret a time that seems to want to escape a binary definition of humanity.

Rui Torrinha

The Gil Vicente Festivals are a joint organization of 'A Oficina', the Municipality of Guimarães, and CAR - Circle of Art and Recreation.