First rehearsal review: Azerbaijan’s Efendi delivers a visual fiesta

The last country to perform its first rehearsal before the break was Azerbaijan. Efendi took the stage to perform « Mata Hari » for the first time on the Eurovision stage.

The performance starts with the shadows of Efendi. She is joined by 4 female dancers from her music video. The background is dominated by pink, green and golden colors.

The dancing is the same which she used in her music video and her Tik Tok challenge. The dancing does not seem very natural to me, however they use a lot of effective wide shots to cover that I think. The camera work in general is quite good and her vocals sound excellent. She also looked stunning.

In the last part of the song we see a lot of flashing lights. No pyro or fire is included in the performance. That leads to my criticism towards the performance. I expected a lot of pyro, especially at the end of the song. The last part just requires fire, pyro and all that stuff. I miss that there. Also, the stage feels kinda empty sometimes – and that with 5 people on stage.

Overall, it was quite a good performance but there are things which can be tweaked until the live shows.

^{Thumbnail photo credit: EBU / Thomas Hanses}