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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how selected Ukrainian Eurovision entries use folklore and nature as symbols of resilience and identity, blending ritual motifs with pop spectacle and reshaping cultural storytelling on the Eurovision stage.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how Ukrainian entries in the Eurovision Song Contest have mobilized folkloric and nature-based narratives as tools of national self-presentation, cultural continuity, and symbolic resistance—particularly in the context of Russian aggression. Focusing on performances such as Ruslana’s Wild Dances (2004), Go_A’s Shum (2021), and Kalush Orchestra’s Stefania (2022), the study reveals how these acts blend archaic ritual elements, traditional costumes, and soundscapes rooted in Ukrainian folk culture with the visual grammar of contemporary spectacle. These performances do not merely aestheticize folklore; they transform it into a dynamic form of narrative action, where forests, fields, ancestral voices, and hybrid creatures become signifiers of endurance, transformation, and connection to the land.

Special attention will be given to how these narratives respond to war-time trauma and reclaim cultural sovereignty through a performative commons, blending the natural and supernatural, the rural and digital. The paper also considers the ripple effect of these Ukrainian performances: how they have influenced other countries' ethno-traditional entries and reshaped the aesthetics of nature and folklore on the Eurovision stage. In doing so, it probes how folklore—when rendered through mass performance—functions as a site of political resilience, collective memory, and ecological imagination in the global arena.