After a year of being on a hiatus, although it is one of the techniques that most impresses us in contemporary circus, it limits us when we talk about time and expectations, LEME returns for a different edition, longer in duration because it is spaced out over more days and more places.

What lies after the emptiness? The compensation, the consequence, the instability, having our heart in our mouth, the monsters under and above all the beds, and the beds are sometimes no more than our chests still loaded with bullets fired by us. But what is the chest, if not also the bed where we land from the fall? And we climbed. We return to the rope, the climb, the structure, the jump, the other.

The bullets are still in our chest, but the idea is that dedramatising and rebuilding are perhaps the easiest way to balance under, over, with and in each other. And then, there are the constant acrobatics of contemplating change, movement, transfiguration: as Rui Paixão did, who began by conceiving “Irredutível” (“Relentless”) in 2020, which gave birth to “Albano” in 2021, which is precisely about being caught off guard. Not knowing what to expect. But if we talk about the shows in this edition, talk about how we got there, navigating up to this point, it is important not to forget what “Un contre un” means to us: we cannot look back.

It's ten days moving forward, in their entirety and set in motion. 

With France as the guest country, and with emphasis on hand to hand acrobatics and Chinese mast techniques in the programming of this edition, we have maintained much of what matters: support for artistic creation and new creators. Through the “Navegar” (“Navigating”) category, training, dialogue and diversity continue to be invested in, both in the programming it presents and in the audiences it invites and welcomes.

There are new spaces. LEME goes to different, unexpected stages, where it tests the limits of the circus and the region, such as the Cais Bacalhoeiro in Gafanha da Nazaré. The challenge to reflect and critically think about contemporary circus remains through the Circus Forum, which promotes a meeting between professionals in the field, and the Beta Circus, a European cooperation project which selects artists who will be integrated in an international training programme on new trends for contemporary creation, with a focus on "new magic", the latter of which is also one of the new features of this year's edition of LEME.