1e repetitie, van de Eurovision live blog
16:20 CEST: Rehearsal 2: 🇫🇷 France - Louane – Maman
Next to rehearse is France’s Louane – she’s an icon of the French music scene, having first come to prominence on The Voice a decade ago with her big vocals and emotional ballads.
The song recounts the journey of a lifetime – a child who became a woman, and a daughter who became a mother. In the official video, the suspended dialogue between past and present is told by Louane looking into a house from her childhood to see her younger self, but the staging in Basel has been taken in a different, but no less powerful, direction.
And to help us all understand the vision, we’ve had some staging notes! Merci beaucoup to the French delegation. They describe the performance as follows:
“On stage, the sand falls—grain by grain, like time slipping through an hourglass. It’s more than a performance. It’s a reminder: time moves fast, and every moment counts.
Maman is about love, loss, and the strength to move forward. The hourglass becomes a symbol of life itself—the cycle, the urgency, the beauty of now. Through the pain, Louane delivers one clear message: no matter what we face, we can always rise. And while the sand keeps falling, we must live—fully.”
So, a few specifics. There’s a circle in the middle of the stage that’s covered with sand. Louane performs the entire song spotlit inside the circle, barefoot in a long, black lace dress, as sand rains down in a continuous stream from the roof above her, falling on one side of the circle.
At one point she kneels and clears a space in the sand to reveal a mirror – every movement is precision-choreographed to meet every drum beat and camera angle, and there’s some stunning camerawork of Louane through the spotlit grains of falling sand. The lighting builds with the orchestral strings, and the drum starts to pound through the floor like a heartbeat until the camera pulls back for a final backlit wide shot. Another one of those performances where we forgot to breathe for a while.
IT'S GREYSIE IT'S PARTY