RAVENNA FESTIVAL’S PROJECT AIMS TO BRING LIVE MUSIC BACK IN OPEN-AIR VENUES, STARTING FROM JUNE
The Festival joins Agis for the proposal submitted to Italy’s Minister of Culture Dario Franceschini
The Ravenna Festival’s project is the concrete example at the heart of the proposal aimed at bringing live music back in Italy, starting from June; today Agis (the Italian Association for Live Events) has presented the proposal to Minister of Culture Dario Franceschini and within this week the document will be reviewed by the task force Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has entrusted with the “phase 2” of the lockdown. The plan, supported also by the other music associations (Anfols, Atit, and ItaliaFestival), could make it possible to hold concerts in open-air venues, in compliance with the regulations against the Coronavirus outbreak and thus guaranteeing the safety of the audience, artists, and staff. The Festival’s case-study, which might hopefully become the role model for all other Italian theatres and festivals to host live performances in summer 2020, is a protocol for concerts in the Rocca Brancaleone, the 15th-century Venetian fortress among the symbols of the city of Ravenna. The open-air venue would allow social distancing, combined with a system of turns for the access of the audience and with masks and hand-sanitizer available for everyone, and could become the key-stone for continuity in the live events field.
If the proposal will be approved by the Italian Government, Ravenna Festival could be – considering the approaching dates of its programme – the first organisation in Italy to host live events since the beginning of the outbreak and the succession of regulations which have closed the doors of all theatres and cancelled events in the whole country. The choice of the Rocca Brancaleone, the historic venue which hosted the Festival’s very first concert in 1990, draws from the Ravenna Festival’s 30-year experience to look forward and make virtue of a necessity – the virtue of resilience of a whole industry which cannot and does not want to surrender, but means to give a signal of activity and wishes for a comeback, even within the limits of this unprecedented world emergency. The live events in the Rocca, which could accommodate up to 250 spectators and orchestras up to 62 musicians, would be combined with web and tv broadcast of those same events and of others events filmed without an audience, part of a highly-accessible, tailor-made summer programme.
