Interview: UNCLE BARRY on The Edge of Eden

Photo: Natasha Mautone

Next month, UNCLE BARRY's The Edge of Eden returns for two weekends at Portugal's Bela Colina. Part creative retreat, part immersive experience, the five-day-long gathering, which is open to all, combines workshops, communal meals and interactive performances to help attendees get into a creative headspace and recharge.

Ahead of The Edge of Eden's return, we caught up with UNCLE BARRY's Ariana Aragon to discuss what last year's attendees took away with them, how the retreat came to be, and what the immersive performance portion of the retreat entails.

---

Immersive Rumours: Hi Ariana! Thanks for speaking with us today. We sat down last summer to discuss Uncle Barry’s Birthday Party, but it's been a busy year for you and Mia since then. What have you both been up to?

Ariana Aragon: Yeah, it's been a busy one, and varied too, which has been exciting. We took Uncle Barry's Birthday Party to Edinburgh Fringe, which went really well with the Fringe audience and allowed us to experiment with different endings that changed every night.

We created a new immersive clubland piece, PLEASE, with Morgan Brame and Flora Lester, which was a non-verbal sound-led immersive piece that moves the audience through the visceral phases of a night out and explores the many facets of pleasure. Think sequins, heavy bass, sweaty dancing, euphoria, burlesque, and the like.

We also launched our first Edge of Eden creative retreat last July with 14 guests in the mountains of Portugal. It exceeded our expectations and led to us hosting two weekends this year (more on that in a bit), alongside diving into some individual projects.

Mia trained in Soho Theatre’s Cabaret & Drag Lab, creating the persona of Pork Shy, a nervous pig who’s afraid to get filthy, and I recently performed in Studio Zweklos' HMR-SEE as the CEO in a cult-like corporate performance-turned-dance party.

We’re also working on our new participatory show, Yours Truly, born from a research inquiry into the ethics of participatory theatre. We're interested in power dynamics present in romance and mapping that to the relationship between audience and performer in participatory theatre. I came on board to direct in February, and we're excited to debut it in a couple of weeks at Format Festival and Voidspace Live 2026.

Immersive Rumours: Alongside everything else you’ve been working on, you’re preparing for the second edition of The Edge of Eden, which is happening next month in Portugal. What can you tell us about the experience?

Ariana Aragon: At its core, the retreat is a merging of the creative team's interests in facilitation, immersive theatre, and site-specific creation. Over their stay, guests get the benefits of a creative retreat but also the excitement and surprise of an immersive theatre show.

By day, Eden functions as a creative retreat with playful, exploratory workshops designed to help guests shake off the rigidity of daily life and tap into a more open, creative state. Being on holiday in the Portuguese mountains obviously helps with that too. We build in downtime as well, with chef-cooked meals, a river excursion, and space to breathe and recharge between sessions.

Then by night, guests are guided through an immersive retelling of Eve's journey towards liberation in the Garden of Eden, with each evening building on the one before and each night experiencing something different from the next.

What we really like about the format is that it doesn't fit neatly into an existing category. It's not a wellness retreat, and it's not a rigorous creative retreat either. It’s an adventure. What we're really after is opening up creative awareness to see creative possibilities more easily and make unexpected connections. We also play with contrasts between day and night, discipline and indulgence, rest and letting loose, peacefulness and drama, and the narrative is what holds all of that together and gives it shape.

Photo: Natasha Mautone

Immersive Rumours: Who else is working on The Edge of Eden besides yourself and Mia? 

Ariana Aragon: The starting team last year was Mia, myself and Aidan Augustin, who is the founder of nonprofit marketing company Feathr and an immersive event enthusiast. We were also really lucky to have our friends from our programme at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama - Laura Monroy and Ariana Sacristan from Otherbox Theatre - alongside us to devise and perform.

This year, the team has grown as we've brought on Daniela Mandoki (also from Otherbox) for sound design and Abigail Chase (also a Central alum) for dramaturgy and performing, which has added a really exciting new layer to the work. Boris Benzent, the co-founder of Bela Colina, has also been incredible in helping us customise the space for the retreat and has been a great partner in making the site work for what we're trying to do, rather than just a venue host, too.

Immersive Rumours: You ran The Edge of Eden last year for the first time. How was that experience, and what kind of creatives ended up attending?

Ariana Aragon: The project was ambitious, and although we were tying up loose ends behind the scenes during that first retreat, it somehow unfolded remarkably smoothly for the guests. We were all pleasantly surprised and a little in disbelief by how well it went for the guest experience, both creatively and logistically. It ended up being so heartwarming, too, because we really didn't anticipate how well the guests would connect with each other.

To give a little snippet of what that looked like - by the final evening, after the facilitators had called it a night, the attendees ended up having a late-night karaoke session in the living room entirely on their own. We came downstairs to find 13 people belting 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' with Boris, the Bela Colina co-founder, beating a drum along to the tune. It was hilarious, and it felt like an oddly good sign of a successful event that they wanted to keep things going long after we'd wrapped.

In terms of who came, it was a really lovely mix of working creative professionals like singers and actors; people who have a creative practice on the side; and then others who work in completely different fields like tech, research, or farming but were curious and open to trying something new.

The workshops are built to work across all levels, so they translated well regardless of where people were starting from. We structure the workshops with the core belief that everyone is creative and that we all have creative instincts worth listening to, so it makes it easier for anyone with an open mind to join in. 

Photo: Natasha Mautone

Immersive Rumours: Was there a particular moment, interaction, or response from attendees that made you realise the concept was resonating in the way you’d hoped?

Ariana Aragon: One of the evenings includes a sensory den that guests can linger in late into the night or visit briefly before heading to bed. We weren't sure how long people would want to stay, especially after two full days of workshops and performances. Not only did everyone stay until the end, but we ended up extending it by an hour because the energy in the room was so alive.

That night really highlighted what a retreat format can do for an immersive experience. When people have had days of being mostly phone-free, sleeping in a beautiful place that's completely outside of their everyday lives, and working through workshops built around openness, listening, and curiosity with each other, they arrive at the evening immersive experiences in a completely different state of readiness than an audience that's just walked in off the street. They were fully plugged into the moment. 

Immersive Rumours: As part of the retreat’s programme, there’s a series of creative workshops. Are they designed for creatives working in specific disciplines, or are they open to anyone interested in developing new skills and ideas?

Ariana Aragon: They're open to anyone who wants to explore creative thinking and is interested in making new connections from what's in front of them. We draw a lot from improvisation and free association practices, which makes room for the creative instincts that everyone has, regardless of the level of training you’ve had.

Whether you have a well-developed creative practice or haven't done anything structured since you were a kid, the workshops are built to be accessible to anyone willing to have a go. We move through a mix of movement, writing, drawing, improv, and, for those who want to incorporate it, music too.

Photo: Natasha Mautone

Immersive Rumours: One element of The Edge of Eden that differs from other creative retreats is the nighttime immersive performances. What do those consist of, and how participatory are they?

Ariana Aragon: The nights follow a reinterpretation of Eve's experience as she moves through the Garden of Eden, starting from a kind of conditional, strings-attached existence towards liberation. Each evening runs around two hours, and the guest experience broadly maps onto Eve's own self-discovery journey, moving through themes of abundance, discipline, curiosity, indulgence, and freedom.

The level of participation and audience agency shifts night to night based on the phase of Eve’s journey. Sometimes guests are primarily watching and listening, and other times they're interacting directly with the world. We work in a pretty atmospheric and sensory way. Guests aren't there to solve a puzzle, complete a game, or play a character, but rather to soak in the world and experience Eve's journey, with the freedom to dial up their interaction or expression as they desire. The world becomes a rich backdrop for their own protagonism in the space.

I was inspired by Gry Worre Hallberg's Sensuous Society experience in Denmark, which is a 24-hour immersive world built around the concept of the poetic self: the inner poetic potential that resides in everyone, but which can be unearthed through the right fictional and creative environments. That philosophy runs through how we've shaped the guest experience, which is why the evenings tend to feel quite dreamy, atmospheric, and relational rather than driven by plot or task.

Immersive Rumours: How did the idea for The Edge of Eden first come about? Had either of you been on creative retreats previously?

Ariana Aragon: The seed was actually planted through our ultimate frisbee league (yes, really) that we play in. Boris, who co-founded Bela Colina, was in the same league and mentioned at the pub after one of our games that he was opening a retreat centre in Portugal and offered us the chance to test the concept in his space.

I've always been drawn to the idea of 'offsite theatre' bringing worlds to life when we step outside of our everyday environment, and mixing that with our facilitation backgrounds and love for immersive and interactive theatre, so we started cooking up the concept pretty quickly after discovering the site.

Though we didn’t have much experience attending retreats ourselves, we all had backgrounds in running large events and organising experiences for groups. Mia had facilitated adventure trips, I've put together company offsite retreats in corporate settings, and Aidan had organised community events in his nonprofit work and social circles. So there was a lot of practical knowledge in the room, in addition to our theatre-making and writing interests. 

Photo: Natasha Mautone

Immersive Rumours: Besides the idyllic surroundings, what else about Bela Colina makes it an ideal place for this kind of work to happen?

Ariana Aragon: When we visited it four months before our first retreat, we immediately felt like kids playing hide and seek, just exploring all the nooks and crannies of the property. It's been beautifully renovated and has a genuine calmness to it, but there are other corners of the site that carry a real sense of mystery and history.

The grounds were formerly used as the gathering place for village parties. There's an old concession stand and a chapel with a clock tower where someone from the village still comes once a week to wind the bell. There are old structures scattered around that feel full of story. All of that texture made it very clear to us early on that whatever we made here had to have a shadowy, mysterious side to it as well.

Immersive Rumours: Finally, what do you hope people who attend The Edge of Eden come away with?

Ariana Aragon: We saw from last year that people left with a group of friends and a sense of creative community. It was clear to us last year that we’d facilitated an environment for connection, and ultimately, it was people’s growing friendships with each other that truly made the experience what it was.

As well as this, we hope guests leave with a bit more wonder and childlike playfulness than they arrived with. The retreat helps people reconnect with their own creative possibilities, both within the workshops and the fictional world we've built around them. If someone leaves inspired to pick up a new project, or feels a little more open with a stranger, or a bit more curious about life when they leave, that’s a win for us. 

Photo: Natasha Mautone

---

The Edge of Eden takes place at Bela Colina in the mountains of Arganil, Portugal, from 19th to 23rd and 25th to 29th June. The advanced rate is £495 per person, rising to £545 for the standard rate. Bed sharers receive £100 off per person.

Both rates include a private room with a double bed for four nights, transfers to and from Porto airport, all chef-cooked meals (dietary requirements accommodated), and all daytime and evening programming.

For more information and to register, visit unclebarry.live/edgeofeden