Reimagining a World(ing) United By Music : A Scenographic Understanding of Eurovision’s Politics of Place

Campbell, Rachel (2025) Reimagining a World(ing) United By Music : A Scenographic Understanding of Eurovision’s Politics of Place. In: Theatre and Performance Research Association 2025, 2025-08-27 - 2025-08-29, University of Warwick.

Abstract

This paper identifies and engages with a core dynamic that underpins the creative, cultural and political direction of the Eurovision Song Contest: the potential to find shared space through engaging with differences, boundaries and borders. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 created a unique situation for the shared performance space of the Eurovision Song Contest 2023 in Liverpool, as this was the first time the contest was hosted by a country that was not the winner of the previous contest due to a war. Through the conceptual lens of Rachel Hann’s scenographic worlding as ‘interventional acts of orientation’ (2019, p.79), I will explore how this shift to sharing the hosting responsibilities of the ESC 2023 shared performance space resulted in this edition of the contest redefining the event’s ‘politics of place’ (Baker et al., 2024, p.3). Place orientation affirms the possibility of potential speculative worlds through the spatial-temporal relationship between the material and the speculative, governed and sustained through the creation of the frames of reference (Hann, 2019). Scenographics allow for the realisation of these potential speculative worlds where material reality is reproduced or challenged in a stage-scene. I argue that the Eurovision stage acts as a perceptual threshold in the relationship between the material and the speculative. Through the use of scenographics as place orientation, I show how stages have the potential to transgress their situated geography to present a potential speculative world to those inhabiting the material reality.