A Thirty Five Metre Long Curtain: Melodifestivalen’s Unique Staging Experiment Written by Ben Robertson on February 29, 2020 | 1 Comment

My first thought was that I’d walked into a theatre rather than a Eurovision pre-qualifier.

This Melodifestivalen stage is not like any we have had before. For a start it is huge. The artist on stage has a space of 360 square metres to roam around. Yes, that means there is more floor space on offer here than at Eurovision last year – the Tel Aviv stage only had 250 square metres for the acts to play with

There’s a very classical look to it as well. Pillars flank either side of the stage and there’s little right angled platforms up on either side. They look as if they are from a bygone era when such flanks would be used by the obigatory orchestra.  Of course modern Melodifestivalen requires no live music and other than for one minute of Malou Prytz balancing above the stage in ’Ballerina’ have the side flanks barely been treaded on.

Most striking though is the backdrop to the stage. I’ve been to many Melodifestivalen and Eurovision competitions in my time now, but never before have I seen a stage with a 35 metre long backdrop completely made up of a fabric curtain. It’s as if somebody had gone to IKEA and bought every single grey curtain and stitched them together in a panic, not even having time to iron out the creases.

But it’s this fabric that’s making every song stand out in completely new and imaginative ways.

The Next New Era

For those of you who remember the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest from Moscow you will likely remember a young Norwegian fiddler who stole you heart, a certain Mr. Alexander Rybak. The staging of his song ’Fairytale’ was equally as revolutionary for the time. That year’s Eurovision stage was gigantic and New York based stage designed John Casey, with a huge hosting budget, used screens made of Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) in the background. During ’Fairytale’ these screens protrayed a gleaming crescent moon, starlight and lit up windows in a wooden village. The fairytale was on screen before Rybak sang his first line.

At the time LED technology was brand new. According to the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) 30 % of the LED screens in the entire world could be found somewhere in that Moscow stage. They became the future, offering so much detail, colour and storytelling opportunities that Eurovision entered what the EBU described as ’a new era’. Nowadays it’s headline worthy if a Eurovision stage does not offer an LED backdrop.

However, just because Melodifestivalen doesn’t have LED screens doesn’t mean that visual storytelling is out the window. Melodifestivalen this year is using new projection technology new to the competition. In total there are eight projectors hidden away between the trusses above the curtain, and each of them project onto a different part of the fabric backdrop. Rather than projections in front of the artist, and covering the entire screen, each of these projectors is responsible for projecting onto a fraction of the fabric. But that’s a big fraction of fabric – the combined 222 square metres of area the largest that Viktor Brattström, Melodifestivalen 2020 stage designer, has ever worked with. And he designed the stages for both of Sweden’s recent Eurovision hostings in 2013 and 2016.

The new technology involved is known as a snorkel lens. Snorkel lens’ physics means that an image can be formed in even the smallest of spaces due to light be thrown out at larger angles. The benefit is that rather than having to project onto the entire stage, including projecting onto the artist, now the projectors can be hidden away from view.

In speaking to SVT, Viktor Brattström explained that it’s only now that the technology is precise enough that the teams can ’handle light like pixels on the projection wall’. SVT once more may be at the forefront of the next new era of innovative television entertainment.

Poetry In Motion

The technology can be handled like pixels, but a like-for-like replacement they are not. As the light spreads out from the projection and hits the zig-zagged curtain the sharp definition is lost. ’Graphical poetry’ is how Viktor Brattström describes the look – where as a viewer the images are definable yet not necessarily clear. There’s a surrealness to the viewing and one has to use their imagination to interpret the story being told. The effect is less brash and far more artistic.

Paul Rey’s performance of ’Talking In My Sleep’, which reached the Andra Chansen rounds, is a prime example. The backdrop splashes with images of people during the song’s last minute crescendo, but these are shadowy silhoutettes rather than detailed pixel perfect images of people. The intention of the stage design is there to emphasise live acts over the video contents. By all means add to the story, but don’t tell the story through a wall of video.

There’s another few benefits you get from having a staging platform involving fabric. For a start it is a far lighter and more moveable material than a wall of LED screens. The staging team here at Melodifestivalen are able after each song to simply draw the curtain up, revealing a huge hole to backstage where all props and instruments are stored. It’s a huge timesaver here between rehearsals, meaning even the most elaborate designs can simply be wheeled in without needing squeeze props down narrow exits stage left and stage right.

There are a couple of downsides however. The first one will be sad for many a Melodifestivalen fan and that the removal of any pyro curtains during a song’s closing moments. Their use will produce so much smoke that they will disperse the light from the projectors making them unsuitable. Pyro can still exist, but different, perhaps less cliché effects are required. A secondary impact is also that it puts extra pressure on one staging role in particular, that of the lighting director. The challenge is to ensure lighting is used to make the stage and artist as bright as required, without interfering with the light projected onto the backdrop.

A New Piece In The Toolbox

As a concept the Melodifestivalen stage offers incredibly flexibility. The areas are huge, yet artists can close themselves off in small corners if they prefer. The use of projections is a step away from the world of Eurovision-as-music-video to Eurovision-as-art, but it’s helping stop artists be engulfed by a wall of LED colour that’s louder than any vocal they can deliver.

That said, LED’s haven’t disappeared. The columns around the stage have LED sections on their exterior to add extra sparkles, generally they are being used to pulse in beat with the music. Furthermore, artists can choose to bring their own LED screens to the party and there’s nothing to stop that from happening. Indeed I’m literally typing these words as I watch Anis Don Demina rehearse with his LED screen looking like a magazine cover and loving its originality.

Wheeling in the props for Albin’s performance of ‘Livet Börjar Nu’ (Photo: Ben Robertson, ESC Insight)

This projection technology goes alongside LED’s as another arsenal is stage designers toolbox. It offers an alternative that encourages a softer and more theatrical expression. I see it as an evolution of our digital age. At first in digitalisation we humans have tried to break down the world into smaller and smaller chunks of on-or-off, black or white, ones of zeroes. But as we increase our number of pixels we realise eventually we get to a limit. Projections offer instead a view of a new digital age that fights against our space race to pixel perfect perfection – but a chance to let digital tools create a mood and feeling that alters our view of reality in a more flowing and dare I say more analogue way.

I expect to see more of it in the future in Sweden, and beyond.