LEME 2025: A Festival of Illusions, Ideas, and Artistic Disruption

In a world where reality keeps shifting and nothing feels fixed, LEME Festival returns December 4–7, 2025 Ílhavo, Portugal with its seventh edition—and it’s diving deep into illusion, transformation, and the very idea of what performance can be.

This isn’t your typical circus. LEME is where contemporary circus meets experimentation, where artists rethink space, the body, and even perception itself. It’s a place where presence and performance blur, where what’s real and what’s staged becomes a conversation—not just a show.

Over four days in the coastal town of Ílhavo, LEME becomes a kind of living laboratory. The festival has always championed unconventional spaces, and 2025 is no different. Shows spill into streets, industrial buildings, and unexpected corners of the city, turning everyday places into sites of artistic transformation.

This year, you’ll find bold new work by emerging Portuguese artists, developed through a year-long residency with the Outdoor Arts Portugal creation grant. The festival also hosts a residency from IN SITU, the European platform for public space creation—bringing in fresh ideas from across the continent.

And of course, there’s the international program: daring, curious, and a little bit unruly, just the way LEME likes it.

If LEME is the playground, LEME PRO is the think tank. This two-day gathering is all about exploring how the arts interact with public space, community, and social change. It’s a space for artists, programmers, researchers, and cultural workers to ask big questions—about creation, collaboration, and the future of performance.

In 2025, the focus lands on the intersection of art and technology, the rise of participatory practices, and how we build new urban imaginaries. Through keynotes, roundtables, book launches, and informal chats, LEME PRO invites everyone to challenge what we know and imagine what’s next.

The full program drops in early September, but here’s a sneak peek at three sessions worth putting on your radar:

Expanding Realities: Performing Arts and the Digital Imagination

CIRCUS FORUM | Roundtable
What happens when live performance meets the digital world? This roundtable explores immersive environments, responsive tech, and how digital tools are reshaping presence, space, and storytelling. Think beyond livestreams—this is about inhabiting new realities, not just representing them.

Performing the Digital Shift: Challenges and New Horizons

CIRCUS FORUM | Keynote
The digital transition isn’t just about adding screens or fancy effects. It’s about rethinking the very way we create and share performance. This keynote takes on the tough questions: What changes? What’s gained—and what’s lost—when technology steps onto the stage?

Inhabiting the Improbable: Art, Community and Territory

Outdoor Arts Portugal Talks | Roundtable
How can art activate public space—not just aesthetically, but socially? This conversation brings together artists and thinkers to explore how creative practices can reshape communities and transform cities. At its heart: art as connection, listening, and collective imagination.

LEME 2025 is shaping up to be more than a festival—it’s a space of artistic resistance, curiosity, and reinvention. Mark your calendar, keep your eyes on Ílhavo, and get ready to question what you see, what you feel, and what you believe.

Artistic Program preview:

Stay tuned—full program coming in September.

Main image: Gandini Juggling. Photo is courtesy of LEME.