Liverpool has been celebrated for managing to find the balance between marking the situation in Ukraine, as well as throwing a giant city-wide party. Host City Creative Director Robin Kemp explains the planning behind this.
There is a line in our winning Eurovision bid which suggests the best way to honour the nation who should have been hosting the contest ‘is to provide a platform not of sorrow or pity, but of celebration for modern Ukraine. A young, vibrant and progressive country… defined by the resilience, energy, humility and humour of its people’
From the outset, the sensitive job of how to appropriately stage Eurovision on behalf of a country that is at war while making sure it feels rooted in Liverpool, was the single most important part of our planning.
Before winning the honour to host, we had already set out a proposal that we wanted to turn the city over to artists from across Ukraine and UK and to use the things Eurovision represents – personal and cultural identity, acceptance, unity and respect – as the basis for that takeover.
And from our very first meeting with the BBC team it was obvious they were on the same page and then some.
They wanted to stage the best produced music show possible, in partnership with an incredible team of people from across both countries, taking this event as seriously as it deserved to be taken.
That commitment to excellence and partnership was liberating – it was exactly what we wanted.
A moment to shift the dial on what the competition represents in the UK. To take it seriously, to not get lost in the nostalgia but to see it as a turning point – the chance for us to go at Eurovision with ambition and style.
But in those initial conversations we realised we needed to find another defining principle to do this justice.
And we kept coming back to one word – joy.
The joy of self expression.
The joy of community.
The joy in shared experiences.
The joy in being able to present to the world a story being lost in the ravages of war.
So, it came to be that this idea – of taking joy seriously – became the yellow and blue thread that ran through everything we did. Our full Euro Festival programme of 24 commissions, our schools and community programme and our nine days of programming in the Eurovision Village.
We worked closely with the team at the Ukrainian Institute and British Council Ukraine – to whom we are hugely indebted – to ensure that what we were presenting felt authentic and representative of modern Ukraine, not that of any hackneyed stereotype. It is down to them that we ended up working with almost 200 Ukrainian artists and musicians as part of the programme.
We encouraged collaborations between UK and Ukrainian artists to ignite that idea of shared experience, and as with everything we have done in the past 15 years, we were artist-led. The stories and projects that came alive over the past fortnight whether in a theatre, a gig or on the streets, were the ones our commissioned artists wanted to tell.
But we also knew we had something up our sleeve no one else could match. To return to the bid, one of the opening was that ‘no other city in the UK puts on a show like Liverpool and there is no better crowd in the world’
And that is ultimately why this whole experience has worked.
We took a huge risk in a number of ways – some of the work we commissioned was challenging. Some were just there to make you smile. But the people of Liverpool and the hundreds of thousands from across the world who joined us, approached each one in the way that it was intended. With humility, with pride and with compassion.
Their hearts were open to the idea that we could put painful, sobering and impactful images next to riots of colour and laughter and that this was not only ok, but was exactly what was needed.
They took Eurovision seriously. They took our responsibility to Ukraine seriously. And they took our need to find joy – in both the big and the brash and the small and intimate – very seriously indeed.
Thank you to every artist, collaborator and supporter who produced such beautiful and inspiring work in such a short time frame. And thank you to the audiences who came, engaged and celebrated Ukraine, Liverpool and Eurovision.
Joy is a very serious business.
Robin Kemp, Eurovision Host City Creative Director
