In November 2022, having just been appointed artistic director of the Olympic Games (OG), Thomas Jolly changed his life. He resigned from the Quai in Angers (the national drama center he has directed since 2020) and embarked on the adventure of the Olympic Games.
Another challenge for this theatre artist who, in 2014, offered the public eighteen hours of an extraordinary Shakespearean performance (Henry VI). The director likes to cross the boundaries. Creator of operas, he is also the one who gave new life, in 2022, to the musical comedy Starmania. So many experiences that led him to take charge of the four ceremonies of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. He looks back on the highlights, settles some scores with the theater, while looking to the future with a still uncertain eye.
Do you have all the cards in hand to take stock of the Olympic adventure?
Honestly? Not at all! Everything happened in quick succession since my appointment in September 2022. Since the end of July, we have had to put on a ceremony every two weeks. I didn’t even have time to watch them on television. I attended the last three from the stage or from the stands, at the Concorde and the Stade de France. It was like a mix between the staging of an XXL opera and my experience of the Cour d’honneur in Avignon. At the opera, around a hundred people coordinate. Here, there were 20,000. It’s huge, it’s nothing like an ordinary show.
Was the adventure a marathon or a sprint?
It was more of a marathon with, at the end, four hurdle jumps. An incredible number of ideas were lined up on the starting line and an incalculable number of obstacles presented themselves in front of each of them. The budget, the technique, but also the weather, the heritage, the security, the river and its bridges, the stability of the quays, and so on. The marathon consisted, for me and my team, of transforming our ideas without denying our initial intentions, while slipping through the nets.
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We made it, even on July 26th in the stubborn rain. I was devastated. I cried all day. But, in reality, this rain gave us immediacy. We were all, public, technical teams, athletes, under the same unifying water. It brought us together. That day, the Parisian weather decided the narration.
How did you experience the growing curiosity around the project?
There was something of the impossible in the project of Thierry Reboul, the executive director of the Olympic ceremonies. This man moves the framework. By announcing an opening on the Seine, he created such a shock of reality that skepticism arose.
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