Conceptualizing and holding a festival that is bold and yet grounded along the lines of growth, sustainability, and the material/immaterial transformation of the city, and whose point of departure is the creative process, seems like quite an unreal proposition, but in fact the Westway LAB, this year in its 3rd edition, has decidedly set out to prove that its strength of ideas and its ability to implement them can help to create new worlds and to formulate even more positive new realities.
Guimarães expresses an identity which enjoys a strong relationship with both Europe and the world. It is increasingly a contemporary city that is open to that fascination about the future which response to the city’s need to remain at the foreground of cultural events that are solidly creative and dynamic.
The Westway LAB thus emerges in this powerful universe of music as an event that brings together three themes at the same time: process, thought, and product.
This is a plan which is increasingly structured upon the importance which creativeness and originality play, the transecting with experience, the embedding of this knowledge into the territory which has encouraged it, and in the sublimation of the innate facets of a city, which, more than focusing on its past history, is motivated to write its future history in an unforgettable way.
But on the topic of history, this 3rd edition of Westway LAB has added new chapters and strengthened the dimensions which distinguish it from other festivals. This year we have set up a new stage in partnership with the international platform for live music, GIGMIT, which will allow musicians and bands to apply to come to appear at a showcase in the festival. And we are paying even closer attention to where to locate the artistic centers of the city, considering the opening concert and the main stage which will make for an unusual and exciting event. Proof of this will be the concert of the legendary Membranes, who will perform their songs accompanied by the Convívio Jazz Chorus.
Above all, it is important to speak about the amazing level energy which the city takes on, with its public spaces buzzing with artists mingling with the population, with this happening more and more with every passing year of the festival. Whether at Tio Júlio’s or at the Vila Flor Cultural Center, the music has come to stay and to transform that which is increasingly becoming a city destined for creative and artistic spirits.
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