Krisia from Bulgaria shines onstage despite power outage during Jury Final

At the Jury Final of Junior Eurovision earlier tonight, a power outage interrupted Bulgaria’s show, plunging the arena into darkness and leaving a nervous Krisia singing in pitch black.

Despite what has been a seamless organisation on the Maltese part thus far, the lights in the arena suddenly went out a few seconds into “Planet of the Children“, and they didn’t come back up for 19 long minutes.

You can watch a video of the incident here.

Some reports said that Krisia cried, but Noel, our correspondent on the ground, says those are just overblown rumours. Krisia put on a brave face and, when it was time to perform again after one hour, she did an amazing job, performing her song flawlessly, to rapturous applause from the audience.

Behind the scenes, the technical crew investigated the problem and found it to be a power failure for the LEDs and lighting. The show was disrupted for 60 minutes. Executive Supervisor Vladislav Yakovlev said:

This was unfortunate, but it does show the reality of live broadcasts and the importance of rehearsals – not just for the participants, but also for all technical aspects of the show. I have been assured by PBS, the host broadcaster, that all issues will be rectified in time for tomorrow night’s televised final, as well as the the technical rehearsal tomorrow morning.

Anton Attard, Executive Producer, said later in the evening that extra generators were being brought in to be fully prepared for tomorrow night’s final. He also apologised to all delegations, members of the audience, and the European Broadcasting Union for the power failure.

After an unfortunate draw and Krisia Todorova’s health issues, the power outage has been one more problem for Bulgaria at Junior Eurovision this year. We are happy to know, however, that Krisia was allowed to perform again and that it was a tremendous success. Let’s hope that this mishap is the last one in Bulgaria’s Junior Eurovision journey and that it will be smooth sailing from here.

MORE JUNIOR EUROVISION 2014 COVERAGE

• Watch all of our rehearsal videos here
• Read all of our JESC 2014 song reviews here
• Check out all of our Junior Eurovision coverage here