Eurovision is here! Delegations have been arriving in Basel in the last few days and rehearsals started on May 3. After closing the first rehearsals to the press in 2022, the EBU has now done away with TikTok videoclips. They will instead release sets of three photographs a day after each rehearsal, as well as description of the proceedings on their official channels. As such, today, we cover yesterday’s rehearsals, and continue with Ukraine, sixth rehearsal of the day, with “Bara Bada Bastu”.
🇸🇪 Sweden – KAJ – First rehearsal
The following pictures have been published by the official Eurovision accounts. (Source: Alma Bengtsson, Corinne Cumming / EBU)
What happened on stage?
This description is sourced from indications given by the official Eurovision Reddit account. This has mainly confirmed what they had already told to Aftonbladet earlier during the season.
- KAJ keep their greeny-brown outfits from Melodifestivalen
- They had to lower the number of backing dancers to three, in order to abide by the Eurovision rule limiting the number of people on stage to six
- In terms of props, this means that the woodshed of the first part of the song is smaller and lighter in order to be flippable by only three dancers to become a sauna in the second part of the performance.
- The fire pit used at the beginning has also been changed into a sauna stove ; the sausage grilled on it will be bigger and more Finnish than in Melodifestivalen, closer to the appearance of a lenkki sausage
- They also have fir trees on stage (although whether they are genuine or not is yet to be confirmed)
- The LED screen will have at least two phases:
- in the first one, matching with the woodshed, it will show a forest
- in the second one, once the shed is flipped into a sauna, it will change to accompany a laser show that will be used for the finish, after the middle-eight
- In addition to the fire pit, pyro jets will be used during the middle-eight (the “Bara bada bastu, bara bada bastu, bara bada, bara bada…etc.”), then followed by steam jets for the laser finish.
Stay tuned for further coverage of today’s photos as they are released, and for our live coverage on the ground starting on May 10, which will include (among other things) the full dress rehearsals and the live shows, live from Basel!
