Sweden: First look at this year’s Melodifestivalen stage!

“The stage can offer great variety and the arena feeling will be elegant and festive, both joy and excitement are promised. Everyone will recognize themselves in the wonderful and lively party feeling. That feeling is always part of Melodifestivalen’s identity.”

LED and all are the concepts of the season. Two angled LED walls with integrated luminaires flank the stage, which rests on a 72 square metre LED floor. Thanks to a high resolution of the LED floor, there are a record number of pixels to play with, and it becomes a fun and useful surface. The experience of the different contributions can be greatly enhanced, according to the design team.

To increase the closeness between the audience and the performers, a narrow playing area is placed in the stalls, some distance from the stage, and creates alternative positions for the Melodifestivalen host. A variety of lamps in the stalls further helps to blur the boundary between stage and audience.

Artistic and technical work hand in hand

The prerequisites for the year have been, among other things, that design and construction should work longer over time, and that everything should also fit in smaller arenas. During the design work, great focus has been placed on the big picture. Included in this is everything from the content of the LED screens (in addition to the contributions), lighting, Green Room and interludes, to the host’s clothes and more. For example, the design team has chosen powder pink as one of the shades that is repeated throughout the arena design, on everything from balloons to the lighting over the audience.

Working with the whole in this way is both artistic and technical work that requires close and dynamic teamwork between some of Melodifestivalen‘s key creators – lighting designers, scenographers, image producers, other producers, number creators and project managers. All of them develop a number of basic practical and design prerequisites from their respective areas. Viktor Brattström adds:

“A challenge this year has been to become more compact without losing sight of the grandeur and dynamism. We believe we have succeeded. I am grateful to have been a part of this event and its development over the years.”