Karleusa Halts Blace Concert Over Missing Girl

Jelena Karleusa stopped her performance last night, August 29, at a concert in Blace after a seven year old girl went missing in the dense crowd. The singer paused mid song and addressed the audience from the stage.

Just a moment, we have an important piece of information. A little girl has gone missing in this huge crowd. She’s seven years old, she’s looking for her mom, if anyone sees her, please let us know, it’s an enormous crowd

Karleusa said, and the crowd reacted immediately, fanning out to look for the child.

The concert closed out Dani Sljive (“Plum Days”), a festival that ran in Blace for three days, from August 27 to 29. Magla Band and Amadeus Band performed before Karleusa took the stage, and the Blace municipality set aside 3.5 million dinars for all three concerts. The girl went missing in the first few minutes of Karleusa’s set, just as the crush around the stage peaked.

Vuvuzelas and whistles could already be heard from part of the crowd during the opening songs. Some attendees tried to disrupt the performance, and there was pushing and shoving between people who had come to hear Karleusa and those who opposed her booking. When word of the missing child reached the stage, Karleusa cut the song short and made her appeal.

The girl was found soon after. As soon as that was confirmed, Karleusa resumed the concert and worked through both her old and new hits.

For the Blace show, the singer wore a fitted black jumpsuit with high heels and black sunglasses, her long blonde hair loose over her shoulders. She had to push through the packed crowd to reach the stage, where she was handed a large bouquet of flowers on arrival.

Estimates of the actual crowd size in Blace vary by source. Informer cites police figures and reports that more than 50,000 people attended the concert, which would be a record for the festival. Local outlets from the Toplica and Krusevac area do not mention that figure, instead describing a large turnout and a divided crowd, part of it celebrating Karleusa’s arrival and part of it unhappy with the choice of performer.

Booking Karleusa for Dani Sljive had already drawn objections from some residents of Blace before the concert took place. Blace municipality president Ivan Burgic had earlier explained why the lineup could not simply follow the results of a poll the municipality ran on its own website, saying performers do not wait around for one town alone but have bookings every single day. According to the Krusevac based outlet 037info.net, the municipality had run a poll about the performers on its site ahead of the festival, but the results ultimately did not decide the lineup, which further irritated part of the local population. All three Dani Sljive concerts, Karleusa’s included, were free for the public.

This was not the first story to come out of this year’s Dani Sljive. We also reported on an onstage proposal, when Aca Amadeus proposed to Barbara Bojovic in front of the crowd in Blace, two days before Karleusa’s concert. The festival, now in its 25th year in the town, will therefore be remembered both for a romantic moment onstage and for a few tense minutes in the crowd in front of it.

Footage from the concert, showing Karleusa pushing through the crowd to reach the stage and later performing in front of a packed central street in Blace, quickly spread on social media. As of this morning, neither the singer nor the Blace municipality had issued any further statement about the incident involving the missing girl, beyond what Karleusa said from the stage.