“Suspended hugs” was the theme of the seventh edition of “Kids, Theater and arts festival for the new generations” which was held in Lecce from December 28th to January 10th in an online version entirely free and on demand on the website KidsFestival.it.

About twenty events with unpublished content, designed and created specifically for this special edition of the Festival. Kids is a project of Factory Compagnia Transadriatica and Principio Attivo Teatro with the artistic direction of Tonio De Nitto and Raffaella Romano, created with the support of Mibact, Puglia Region, Municipality of Lecce, Teatro Pubblico Pugliese.

In this seventh edition we tried to invent a festival in a new way, which would give us  the opportunity to test ourselves, to create again after this forced block and to the public the real feeling that, what was proposed, was exclusively designed for them.

We thus put aside the idea of ​​proposing shows already made, showing videos that are perhaps not suitable for the real audience, because they are usually made for operators in the sector, and so we looked at three characterizing elements of the previous festival, the project “Traveling with the stories” that we have been making for 5 years now in the beautiful Railway Museum of Lecce and “The Kids village”, the container of live workshops conducted by many operators of our two companies and “the meetings”.

These meeting realized by streaming in turn responded to three important moments of the festival, the focus with a master of the theater in this case Antonio Catalano, a meeting with an author, who in this edition was Bruno Tognolini, and a meeting with the operators of the sector dedicated to Digital.

So, for this edition, a mini theatrical series (through the use of a hybrid language between cinema, tv and theater)  was born with 9 episodes entrusted to 9 actors who dealt with classics as well as original stories and some workshops that involved the involvement of the public from a distance.

Excellent results in terms of listening and contacts, an experience that in the future will surely have to find the opportunity to live alongside ordinary programming.