1e repetitie, van de Eurovision live blog:
15:30 CEST: Rehearsal 7: 🇬🇷 Greece - Klavdia – Asteromáta
In Thursday’s running order it will be the UK next, but as one of the Big 5 they don’t rehearse until Thursday. So instead it’s time for Greece’s Klavdia, a 22-year-old singer and songwriter who is a well-known performer and TikTok star in Greece.
Asteromáta is a traditional Greek expression that describes women with bright, starry eyes – the closest English translation would be ‘little starry-eyed one’. This staging for this soaring ballad is entirely different from the performance we saw at Ethnikós Telikós, so we’re very grateful to the Greek delegation for giving us some staging notes! They describe the performance as follows:
“Klavdia begins her appearance on the Eurovision stage standing on a pier. Her movement toward a rock symbolizes the fiery journey each person undertakes to the Light.
The presence of a second person on stage, along with the movement of the set, reflects the theme of separation - the central message of the song "Asteromata".
So we have our first rock of the season as a central prop, and once Klavdia has walked along the pier in the quiet opening verse, she performs the rest of the song on top of it. She’s joined by one female dancer for the second verse, but they drift away on the pier, leaving Klavdia alone on her rock, wearing a long, fitted gown that sparkles with tiny jewels. In different lights it looks either black or a very dark navy blue – it's hard to tell but hopefully that will be clearer on the photos tomorrow.
There’s some lovely camerawork in this performance, with overhead shots making it look like the pier is in water, which then morph into dramatic burning trees and volcanic landscapes that spread up the LED wall as the song builds. The lighting and graphic effects are stunning – at one point Klavdia lifts her arm, and blue lights sweep across the set. Her vocals lift the roof off the arena, with the lego lights descending at the end to create the same tiered effect we saw for Albania yesterday. We (sadly) don't speak Greek, but we can still feel the love and loss and pain in every line.
IT'S GREYSIE IT'S PARTY