1e repetitie, van de Eurovision live blog
14:10 CEST: Rehearsal 5: 🇱🇺 Luxembourg - Laura Thorn – La Poupée Monte Le Son
Welcome back! Hope you had a nice lunch. It’s time for 25-year-old Laura Thorn from Luxembourg to rehearse - she’s a singer and multi-instrumentalist, as well as a teacher at the Conservatoire de Musique in the south of Luxembourg.
Sung in French, La Poupée Monte Le Son translates as ‘the doll turns up the sound’, and it’s a fun, up-tempo bop that is both a throwback and a sequel to Poupée de cire, poupée de son, the legendary song that won Eurovision for Luxembourg’s France Gall exactly sixty years ago.
It’s also exactly the kind of uptempo bop we need after lunch, and we’re interested to see how the staging has evolved since Laura win The Luxembourg Song Contest earlier this year. The answer is…a lot - the Doll-Laura concept, with male dancers who combine 60s-style moves with puppet references, has remained, but the ability to project huge LEDs on both the stage and the screen has elevated to something else entirely.
Now Laura is inside her own pink and red 1960’s style doll’s house, with animated hands that reach in to reposition her through the opening sequence. She has five male dancers, wearing similar red velvet suits to the ones we saw at The Luxembourg Song Contest, but the way they interact with Laura is now a precision dance routine, where her doll-like stiffness at the start relaxes through the performance into something more natural and human. She leads them down the walkway in the second verse, figuratively and literally leaving the doll’s house behind, so the final section can play out on the frame stage.
This story is told in her costume too – the pink doll dress she wore in the national final has been replaced with a much more sophisticated version, in pale pink with corset-style lacing, paired with silver thigh boots. In the middle eight the pink dress comes off to reveal a sparkly silver dress underneath – there are no female dancers in this version, it’s just Laura and her dancers creating what feels more like a dance break than the original version. It was always a fun song, but this staging elevates it a much more cohesive and powerful bit of visual storytelling.
IT'S GREYSIE IT'S PARTY