the goddess Aurora conquers the hearts of festival-goers with her celestial voice

5:35 p.m. Barefoot, Aurora arrives on the boards of the biggest Rock en Seine installation. This “fairy of the woods”, as Pilar likes to call her, one of her fans from the start, prefers to sing with her toes in the air. “I sometimes feel like my voice is coming from the ground, through my feet, then out of my mouth,” she explained in an interview with The B-side in February 2022. The singer says she derives her power from “Mother Nature” to whom she feels particularly connected… without her shoes! And how, this Sunday, August 28, the Norwegian slender unleashed all the elements on stage. The fire, perhaps even more than the others.

Signing the horns of the rock with her hands, Aurora arrives jumping, dressed in a long flying outfit embellished with a delicate white corset. Probably a wedding dress picked up by the singer. “Aurora has between five and ten dresses of the style, which she wears during her concerts”, tells us her sister and stylist Viktoria Asknes. Long jellyfish-like filaments hang from its arms. The bass resounds and its angelic tone flies to the heavens on its first hit. Heathensobviously in homage to nature.

Applause, the hands move and attract the attention of the joyful eye of the singer. In her childish, laughing voice, she addresses the crowd from which soap bubbles escape. “You look like tiny little poisons”, she chants full of mischief. General tenderness. Before adding, she too like a fish in water: “I played here a few years ago. I was so young, I couldn’t see anything, I was scared. I couldn’t even drink beer! But today I feel good, and I’m too happy to be back.”

And she is not alone. This time, the French singer Pomme accompanies him – to everyone’s surprise – on their duet Everything Matters. “I did not expect it at all. Seeing them both at the same time was too beautiful, magical”, says Pilar still upset. The two singers who recorded their hit remotely are performing together for one of the very first times. On stage, behind the tinted lenses of his orange glasses, Apple keeps meeting the gaze of his Norwegian counterpart. The meeting ends with a tender embrace. “A symbiosis!”, adds the young fan.

This is one of the few quiet moments in the show, before Aurora starts to get restless. “I’m very expressive on stage, I don’t care what people are going to think, although I can sometimes scare them…”, she relates in an interview for the media NME, given in February 2022. To she alone manages to inhabit the entire space of the immense stage. She runs, jumps and dances from right to left, never stopping. With boundless energy, she shakes her icy blonde square in all directions, so that one wonders how not to come out of there with a stiff neck.

Fans wiggle too. “I think Aurora chose the songs really well. She selected catchy songs that could appeal to those who don’t know her too well”, note the Niçoises Aline and Tatiana, four red lines drawn on the face like the singer in the clip The Seed. Aurora’s rendition of it on stage pleased them, as did that of Warrior. “The spectators all had their fists in the air, and we sang in unison.”

The singer’s fanbase also calls themselves “warriors” (warriors), but also sometimes “weirdos” (the weirdos). For the artist, the two nicknames are equivalent: “weirdos have to fight more in this life. If you’re a weirdo, you’re a warrior too.” Because Aurora likes to talk to those who do not necessarily fit into societal norms, the outsiders. It is also listening to her music that Billie Eilish found her vocation as a singer. On the first notes of Giving In to Love, Aurora ends her concert with a sentence: “Be yourself, no matter who you are”, and flies away in a light bow. True to herself.