Sequana shines in the City of Light (Part 2)
… and now let’s talk about the women (and a bit of singing and dancing)
No, this post is not about that sequence. I am afraid, dear readers, that you must await Part 3 for that. Even though it is apparently the only part of the Olympics opening ceremony most people seem to wish to talk about, it is, for me, just about the least interesting. Here, I will focus on things I care about more: women, and dance.
The opening ceremony was organised around twelve sequences: enchanté (the sequence that included the Lady Gaga performance I discussed in my last post), synchronicité (focused on the rebuilding of Notre Dame), liberté (the revolution), égalité, fraternité, sororité (all of which will get a mention in this post), sportivité (where new Olympic sports were featured on platforms decorated like the gardens of Versailles), festivité (that sequence—see Part 3), obscurité (featuring Juliette Armanet singing John Lennon’s “Imagine”, as an unofficial Olympics peace anthem), solidarité (the silver rider—more on that presently), solennité (mostly speeches: the boring bit—although there was a stunning sign language dance performance by US deaf dancer Shaheem Sanchez, against the backdrop of an Eiffel Tower lightshow), and éternité (where the flame is passed among a number of celebrated veteran athletes in a moving sequence: my personal heartwarmers were “perfect-ten” Romanian former gymnast Nadia Comăneci and out lesbian former tennis world number 1 Amélie Mauresmo, who subsequently became a coach and is now director of the French open). And, contrary to what many detractors have suggested, women were key figures in practically all of them, except maybe the speeches: that was a bunch of blokes. It was, however, pleasing to see the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, receive the Olympic Laurel during those speeches. Grandi has been an enthusiastic supporter of the Refugee Olympics team, first created at Rio in 2016.
First up, I would like to address a criticism I have encountered within my networks, concerning the image of a beheaded Marie Antoinette in the windows of the Conciergerie (see Part 1). Some simply found it in poor taste, while others asked “Why her? Why not the image of Louis XVI instead? Why did they have to show, yet again, a woman to whom violence was done?”
The simple answer to that question is: because this was the Conciergerie. Louis XVI was not imprisoned there, but Marie-Antoinette was. Louis was imprisoned in the Temple, a fortress built by the Knights Templar in the 13th century and used as a prison by the revolutionaries, before being destroyed on the order of Napoleon in 1808. They couldn’t very well put Louis in the windows of a prison he had never been in.
I do, however, have some sympathy with the protest that it was a woman shown here, and this particular woman. Marie-Antoinette was unfairly detested, long before the Revolution started, mainly because she was foreign (Austrian) and had difficulty adapting to the rituals of French court life, preferring to keep her independence as much as possible. (It also took her several years to produce an heir, as it appears that neither her nor Louis was particularly interested in sex with the other.)
That said, I am in two minds about the criticism concerning the poor taste of showing this image at all (regardless of the sex of the beheaded person), the argument I have inferred being that it is unseemly to show this sort of gore at a festive event. Although a victim of circumstance (and male domination) Marie-Antoinette was still part of the ruling class, and there is no evidence she cared a toss for the poor—although the “Let them eat brioche” line (translated inaccurately as “cake”) attributed to her is apocryphal. (Its origin is probably Rousseau’s Confessions, written when Marie-Antoinette was still a little girl in Austria and hardly anyone in France had ever heard of her.) During the revolution, the already-loathed queen became the quintessential symbol of the despised monarchy, and thus iconic within the context of the liberté sequence. So there is a justification within the context of the scene.
Her portrayal in the sequence is also ironic, because Marie-Antoinette’s head is singing “Ah! Ça ira”, a song that more than any other is associated with the revolution, and is optimistic in tone (“ça ira” means “it’ll be fine”). Having a monarch who suffered and then was killed during the Terror singing a revolutionary song, and one that means “it’ll be fine”, is funny, even if the humour is dark.
Dancing queens (and kings)
As a former dancer (who also occasionally dabbled in choreography), I revelled in all the dance sequences, and would like to tell you about someone whose name has barely been mentioned—if at all—in the Anglosphere discussion of the opening ceremony. That person is Maud Le Pladec (a Breton name if ever I saw one, and yes, she is from Brittany), and she was in charge of the choreography for the entire event. Director of the National Choreographic Centre of Orléans, Le Pladec, who has considerable experience in preparing open air events, was responsible for over 3,000 people performing in just about every imaginable dance style.
As far as I am concerned she met that challenge superbly, whether we are talking about—to name just a few examples—the dancers of the synchronicité segment on quai de la Corse (Île de la Cité) whose routine incorporated splashing about in shallow water (not the rain), while dancers from the “vertical dance” company Retouramont dangled from Notre Dame’s reconstruction scaffolding; or the lone Paris opera ballet star, Guillaume Diop (the first black dancer to be named principal artist—danseur étoile—of the celebrated ballet company) who performed on the rooftop of the Hôtel de Ville (Paris City Hall); or the orchestra of the Garde Républicaine who joined French-Malian pop singer Aya Nakamura in some cool moves as she performed a medley of her own songs and one of Charles Aznavour’s. Nakamura and the Garde Républicaine are the stars of the égalité sequence of the ceremony, a conscious choice that is all the more powerful because of the online and on-screen sexualised racism of which Nakamura has been the target.
Sororité
The segue from fraternité (brotherhood) to sororité (sisterhood) took the form of mezzo soprano Axelle Saint-Cirel singing a stunning solo of the Marseillaise atop the Grand Palais. (Yes, she is black too: one of the pleasing aspects of this opening ceremony was the foregrounding of so many ethno-racial minority performers, and not in tokenistic ways.) After she finishes, we see surging from the river ten golden statues of celebrated French women. The first is Olympe de Gouges, feminist and anti-slavery activist who wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Women in 1791. She was “shortened” (guillotined) in 1793, ostensibly because she was a monarchist but probably because she was a feminist. Feminist scholars have resuscitated her memory and there is now a place Olympe de Gouges in the third arrondissement of Paris. (For those interested in finding out more you could listen to this interview I did on ABC Radio Sydney back in 2020.)
The second is Alice Milliat, swimmer, rower and hockey player and co-founder and president of the Fédération des sociétés féminines sportives de France. She was a prominent campaigner for the international recognition of women’s sport. The third is Gisèle Halimi, whom I may have mentioned in a previous post. Halimi, of Tunisian Sephardic background, was a lawyer by profession and a prominent fighter both for women’s abortion rights and for Algerian independence. She was a major figure of the “second wave” feminist movement in France and the 1980 law criminalising rape is largely thanks to her. The fourth, Simone de Beauvoir, would, I hope, need no introduction. The fifth is Paulette Nardal. Born in Martinique and great-granddaughter of a slave, Nardal, the eldest of seven children, was the first black woman to study at the Sorbonne in the 1920s. Co-founder of the journal Revue du Monde Noir, Nardal elaborated the ideas underpinning the Négritude movement (but is usually disappeared amid discussion of such male figures as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor).
The sixth is Jeanne Barret, 18th century explorer and botanist. She was the first woman to sail around the world (disguised as a man) and identified many plant species. The seventh is Christine de Pizan, late-medieval philosopher and poet, believed to be the first European woman to have lived from her writings. Her celebrated La Cité des dames, a celebration of illustrious and cultivated women and an imagining of a government of women, is widely considered to be a proto-feminist text. The eighth is Louise Michel, feminist and anarchist, hero of the revolutionary Commune of 1870-71. Michel was deported to the penal colony of New Caledonia where she remained for nine years. She was a lifelong feminist, anti-colonial and workers’ rights activist, who also campaigned for animal rights. The ninth is Alice Guy: see my 7 July post “Of fantasy, fallacy, and the fury of magpies” to learn more about her. The tenth is Simone Veil, a survivor of the Nazi camps and career politician. In 1979 she became the first female president of the first European parliament to be elected by universal suffrage, but prior to that, in 1975, she had, as French Health Minister, been responsible for decriminalising abortion, responding to a longstanding campaign by feminists (who included, of course, Gisèle Halimi).
Those ten golden statues are to be given to the city of Paris following the Games.
Joan and Sequana
In Part 1 I wrote about Sequana and mentioned Joan of Arc on her marvellous mechanical silver steed (which itself incarnated Sequana through merging with the river). Of course, everyone has heard of Joan of Arc, even if not everyone knows a lot about her.
She has been diversely claimed as an emblem by feminists, Catholics, nationalists, the French far right and now by the genderist lobby. Some of you may recall that in 2022 a theatre production in Shakespeare’s Globe in London depicted Joan as “non-binary” with they/them pronouns. This retroactive transing of our Joan is based, it would appear, solely on the fact that she cross-dressed and worked among men in a “man’s” soldiering job. By that yardstick, Jeanne Barret, mentioned above, would be considered trans or non-binary as well. (In passing, the observation has been made that the designation “non-binary” sets up a contrast with what non-binary is “non” from: binary. Thus setting up another binary. Gotcha.) All this to say that Joan has become a sort of “floating signifier” (thanks for that one Claude Lévi-Strauss), meaning whatever the group that is appropriating her wants her to mean.
In Paris 2024, this famous late medieval cross-dressing horsewoman (who wouldn’t have had a clue what the non-binarists were on about), soldier (and martyr) for God and Country and one of the four patron saints of France, became patron saint of the Olympic Games, in the sequence solidarité. She was incarnated on the metallic silver Sequana horse by its creator Morgane Suquart and later on a real dappled grey horse by mounted policewoman Floriane Issert. In both cases she was dressed by designer Jeanne Friot and instead of a patriotic or religious standard, she bore the Olympic flag. Pretty obvious symbolism even for the uninitiated. (Unfortunately, in a notable gaffe, the flag that Issert presented was then hoisted upside down. There was much outrage expressed about this but I found it hilarious: unintentional iconoclasm.)
As Joan is a floating signifier on top of her stable signification of being France’s patron saint, one could say she had something to please everyone, from the far right to the feminists to the genderists—and fitting with her floating signifier role, she also floated on the Seine atop her silver steed. I do like it that this segment had an all-female team (at least its human one: I haven’t checked what the sex of the horses was), and particularly that the designer of the metal horse, that technological and æsthetic marvel, was a woman.
Only drag queens at the opening ceremony? Well, those who thought that must have dozed off for about three hours.
So well laid out. Am sharing to other places to counter some of the craziness.