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Paris 2024 Ceremonies: XXL spectacle, success but some drawbacks
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 flats and a controversy of international magnitude. – Artistic successes – “I have the feeling of the work accomplished”, assured Thomas Jolly to the AFP Sunday evening, after the last show at the Stade de France dedicated to some 4,000 Paralympic athletes, a big concert with figures of French electronic music (the French Touch) rather than a show strictly speaking. On July 26, with his river parade on and along the Seine, up to the foot of the Eiffel Tower, to open the Olympic Games, the artistic director had set the bar very high. Full of discoveries and enthusiasm, rhythmic, this telegenic four-hour show had painted the picture of a benevolent and inclusive France. The meeting of the 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 especially 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 the choreographies of Alexander Ekman honoring dancers with disabilities and celebrating bodies in their diversity. – Record audiences – The July 26 show reached a peak, watched live by 23.2 million viewers, then replayed by 1.2 million people. The closing of the Olympics, on August 11, attracted just over 17 million. On the Paralympic side, the audiences were not as 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. The same is true for the financial cost of these ceremonies. – Downsides – The rain came to disrupt the opening of the Olympics, 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 show – 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 criticized during the first part of the show but OBS reported a “problem-free” event. 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 a sad hangover”, contrasting with the joy of the two weeks of competition that preceded it. – A controversy – During the first ceremony, a tableau performed in particular by drag queens was criticized around the world by religious authorities and conservative political leaders who saw it as an inappropriate reference to the Last Supper, Christ’s last meal. The organizers denied having wanted to mock the Christian religion, assuring that they wanted to represent a pagan festival and hold a ceremony “which reconciles.” “How can anyone believe that, in my mind, there could have been any intention 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 earned Thomas Jolly and DJ Barbara Butch, the feminist and lesbian activist who is the star of this painting, death threats and an online harassment campaign that the justice system is investigating. According to a source close to the investigations, these were “very concerted, very prepared and very technically advanced” attacks, with several perpetrators taking great “precaution” (VPN, virtual numbers). Some of them are “abroad”.kp-tll/pel/hpa
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