Yesterday was a huge first day in the Eurovision arena, with the first 10 artists taking to the stage for the first rehearsals. Today we’ve got the next round of artists from the first semi-final, and it features some of the contest favourites! Here’s the action from Day 2!
Finland
Finland are one of the favourites for 2018, both to win, but also among fans, so there’s a lot of pressure on Saara to deliver something fairly spectacular to break her second place streak and take the contest back to Finland. No pressure, right?
Visuals:
When you think of Eurovision, you think of props, and Finland is definitely serving this up. They’ve got two main props, the first of which is a wheel of which Saara begins her performance in, and she’s spun around so she’s singing upside down. Once she’s unstrapped, there’s some movement on stage, but primarily it’s the backing vocalists/dancers who are doing the majority of the dancing, which is allowing her to vocally shine.
The lighting we’ve got on stage is blue and purple, and it seems to be the most appealing combination of all we’ve seen on stage. Alongside the wheel of fortune, we’ve got what looks like to be a spaceship situation on stage. She goes up the stairs onto this structure towards the end of the song, which is when we also see a waterfall of fireworks, naturally.
Costuming:
Saara is wearing a short black dress (or playsuit perhaps, it was hard to distinguish) that is completely embellished with crystals, and has a plunging V neck to highlight the massive crystal necklace that resembles the shame of a spine. (Bulgarian bones, anyone?)
I’m sure it was not just us who was expecting Saara to be drenched in colour, but surprisingly they’ve kept it ‘simple’ with black. This really works for them, as the staging is so over the top that having her in black keeps the visuals slick.
Vocals:
We weren’t too sure what to expect from Saara, but for the most part she delivered. Towards the end of a few of her run through’s it was somewhat shaky, especially in those final notes when the backing singers were also backing her up. Unfortunately the two combined didn’t quite mesh, and that was a running theme throughout the performances. The backing singers are choosing a very high pitch to sing certain lines, and at those times you could feel the collective cringe in the press centre. From Saara herself though, impressive.
