Spectacular, creative, each in its own style: the four ceremonies of the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games, imagined by Thomas Jolly and his teams, punctuated the two sporting sequences, resulting in undeniable successes, a few drawbacks and a controversy of international magnitude.
– Artistic successes –
“I feel like I’ve done my job,” Thomas Jolly told AFP on Sunday evening, after the last show at the Stade de France dedicated to some 4,000 Paralympic athletes, a major concert with figures from French electronic music (French Touch) rather than a show in the strict sense.
On July 26, with his river parade on and along the Seine, up to the foot of the Eiffel Tower, to open the Olympics, the artistic director had set the bar very high. Full of ideas and enthusiasm, rhythmic, this telegenic four-hour show had painted the picture of a benevolent and inclusive France.
The meeting of singer Aya Nakamura and the musician gendarmes of the Republican Guard on the Pont des Arts, the sound and visual explosion of the metal group Gojira at the windows of the Conciergerie will remain in the memories, as will the Marseillaise, anything but martial, sung by the mezzo-soprano Axelle Saint-Cirel. And above all the final comeback of Céline Dion on the first floor of the Iron Lady.
Another success: the opening of the Paralympics, Place de la Concorde, on August 28, with the hard-hitting images of Alexander Ekman’s choreographies honoring dancers with disabilities and celebrating bodies in their diversity.
– Record audiences –
The July 26 show peaked, watched live by 23.2 million viewers and replayed by 1.2 million people. The closing of the Olympics on August 11 drew just over 17 million.
On the Paralympic side, the audiences were less good, unsurprisingly, but clearly higher than those of previous editions (10.2 million people at the opening on August 28 and 7.7 million at the closing on Sunday).
International audience figures are not available. Nor are the financial costs of these ceremonies.
– Flats –
Rain has arrived to disrupt the opening of the Olympic Games, forcing the artistic teams to cancel or amend certain performances.
But it was above all the subsidiary of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) responsible for filming the Games, OBS (Olympic Broadcasting Services), which was criticized for its image capture. Thomas Jolly himself felt that the director had “missed a lot of moments”.
OBS acknowledged difficulties related to the weather (drones and three helicopters initially planned did not take off) and the scale of the spectacle – the first outside a stadium in the history of the Games – but denied any failure.
At the opening of the Paralympics, it was the sound recording that was criticised during the first part of the show but OBS reported that it “went smoothly”.
The futuristic closing of the Olympic Games received a mixed reception because of its very dark tone. The artistic teams had imagined a dystopia striving to show the “fragility of the world”. The American press spoke of “a feeling of sad hangover”, contrasting with the joy of the two weeks of competitions that preceded it.
– A controversy –
At the first ceremony, a tableau performed by drag queens was criticized around the world by religious authorities and conservative politicians who saw it as an inappropriate reference to the Last Supper, Christ’s final meal.
The organizers denied having wanted to mock the Christian religion, assuring that they wanted to represent a pagan festival and hold a ceremony “that reconciles.” “How can one believe that, in my mind, there could have been any desire to mock the Catholic religion, knowing that, in this ceremony, an entire painting is dedicated to Notre-Dame de Paris?” protested Thomas Jolly on Sunday evening.
But the sequence notably earned Thomas Jolly and DJ Barbara Butch, the feminist and lesbian activist who is the star of the scene, death threats and an online harassment campaign that the courts are investigating.
According to a source close to the investigations, these are “very concerted, very prepared and very technically advanced” attacks, with several perpetrators taking a lot of “precautions” (VPN, virtual numbers). Some of them are “abroad”.
kp-tll/pel/hpa
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