BLUE SUMMER SCHOOL 2026

Escola Verão Azul (Blue Summer School) is returning to Faro, following its debut in 2024. This second edition takes over the city for seven days – from September 19th to 25th -, transforming it into a living stage where emerging artists and experienced professionals converge in a creative environment designed to stimulate exchange and collective learning.

Conceived as a space for training and research, for sharing practices and artistic experimentation, Escola Verão Azul (Escola VA), which retains the motto A Small Step for Mankind, presents this year an edition dedicated to voice, performance, body, and transdisciplinary practices.

It is a space for exploring alternative ways of thinking, feeling, and creating. It operates on the conviction that every new idea, every new methodological approach, and every new creative path are seeds with the potential to affirm and transform the performing arts. And, through them, to spark critical reflection on today’s world, fulfilling an immemorial role of artistic creation – interpreting and questioning the present.

Similar to the first edition, this year’s training program unfolds into four intensive workshops led by artists whose practices have left a mark on the national and international contemporary scene: Julia Bardsley, André Uerba, Flora Détraz, and Miguel Cheta.

They lead four proposals to imagine other ways of creating, exploring concepts such as deep listening and observation, memory and the archive of daily life, intimacy as a political practice, the voice as a territory of transformation, collective resilience, the construction of alternative imaginaries, and experimentation between body, matter, image, and thought.