• Coronavirus: Sónar renounces its 2020 edition

After a disastrous week for live music - in just seven days Sónar, Primavera Sound, Mad Cool, Azkena Rock and BBK Live have fallen - finally a hopeful news: the Festival Cruïlla has just announced that it will not hold its usual edition this year either summer but it reinvents itself and proposes a new pocket format adapted to the new normality: a festival of small dimensions that is longer in time, in which the safety distance of two meters will be maintained and strict hygiene measures will be required. It is the first Spanish musical event that meets the Government's recommendations , which in phase 2 allows outdoor performances with the audience seated as long as the number of 400 people is not exceeded.

"Better to be active than complaining," explains its director, Jordi Herreruela. "We want to transform the non-continuous and hammering that we have heard in recent times into a big yes. We may not do something as big or important, but the industry has to get to work," he adds. The Cruïlla XXS proposal is a smaller festival but multiplied in time and in emblematic spaces such as the modernist enclosure of the old Hospital Sant Pau, the gardens of the National Theater of Catalonia or the Pueblo Espanyol in Montjuïc. The possibility of including the Forum, its original location, is being studied. The festival also holds conversations with the City Council in search of more scenarios until reaching "eight or nine".

The price of tickets will range between 15 and 45 euros and the performances will not be unique, but repeated several days. "Now an artist may have to work four or five days to earn what they used to do in one day, but we are receiving a lot of interest from the whole sector, we can see the desire to return to the activity. We cannot stop until that there is a vaccine, "explains Herreruela.

Most of the poster, not yet announced, will be local, although there are proposals on a national scale and there are several "long-distance" artists who have shown their willingness to lower their cache to meet again with the public on stage. The profit margins of this pocket Cruïlla will also be XXS, acknowledges its director, who thinks more about the "positive impact on the mood of the group" than on profits. Most professionals in the live music sector are self-employed and have seen their activity freeze dry.

The festival had Gwen Stefani, Morcheeba and Placebo as international headliners . Also to local artists such as Txarango, Meritxell Nedderman, La Fura dels Baus and Sopa de Cabra and national artists such as León Benavente, Kase O and Novedades Carminha. Tickets for the 2020 edition will be valid for 2021 and the festival will contact all buyers by email in late May to offer other options.

Herreruela has been working on the project for about three weeks and after consulting with the Institute of Global Health of the University of Barcelona and other professionals, she has concluded that although the margin of error of the tests is percentage very low (that was one of the first options, do quick tests and measure the temperature of all attendees), in a context of overcrowding, the contagion capacity is very high. So the safety distance of two meters and the hygiene measures that are in force in phase two will be imposed. Something that will surely limit the gastronomic part, the foodtrucks. "Probably everything has to come cooked to the festival to be safe," he admits.

The idea is that they can sit together "those who come together or have bought the ticket together because it makes no sense that you can sit on a terrace with your partner but you cannot see a concert with her." There will be batches of exit and entrance to avoid crowds and queues at the bar will be part of the past: it will be served individually at the table with a waiter service. Now we can only hope that next July the city of Barcelona has passed to phase 2.

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