A ceremony planned down to the last detail from June 2023
This Friday, we will be able to take a 30-second look at the Opening Ceremony: a passage full of energy, a mix of contemporary and urban styles. For the rest, we will have to let the dancers become familiar with the steps and wait until July 26.
“There are tests in hangars like this one, but there are many others,” he explains. Thomas Jolly, artistic director of the ceremonies. “There will also be indoor rehearsals with larger spaces, because several hundred dancers cannot fit here, and at the last minute we will go on site.”
Just over a month before the decisive date, everything is becoming a reality for the designer of this great show, who has been working on this project with his trusted men for more than a year and a half.
“The ceremony was conceived in June 2023,” he explains. “Later, there was a whole phase of feasibility study on the resistance of the bridges, the docks, the wind, the currents… And since then, we have been adapting, fixing, modifying, until we found the appropriate harmony.”
Every detail has been designed to elevate the City of Light and sport before the millions of spectators and television viewers who will admire the spectacle on D-Day.
“For the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, we are going to take advantage of all the historical monuments that surround the Seine, and there will not be a single bank or bridge that will not be filled with music, dance or spectacle,” he explains. Maud Le Pladec. “We talk about dance, but there are also more visual paintings, music, sports, etc.”
Given the inconsistency of the weather at the beginning of 2024 and the meteorological instability of Paris, all kinds of weather conditions for July 26: torrential rain, storms, strong winds, heat wave… Nothing is left to chance in the design of this ceremony.
“We know that we won’t be able to control the weather, so we have to take that into account and find a way to be flexible,” says Thomas Jolly. “We have plans in place if the current is a little stronger or a little weaker, and the ceremony will adapt based on humidity levels. If there are sets that become slippery or dangerous, we will have to adjust those passages, but others will be preserved.” .
“The ceremony has a flexible format depending on what we encounter that night,” he continues. “We have planned everything, and everything is adaptable. There is a reason it is called live performance, you have to work with what is alive, that is, what is real: the river, the sky.”
