Sequana shines in the City of Light (Part 1)
Shimmering silver on the Seine (despite all the spluttering)
(Well you can’t beat a sparklingly sibilant alliteration can you.)
As it’s Olympics time, I do have some things planned on women and sport (even though I’m about as far away from being a sports fan as you can get) but first things first. Which means the opening ceremony. And, as befits a blog called “adventures in fallacyland”, I’m going to be debunking a few fallacies here.
I may lose some followers and subscribers over this one but I’m not here to pander, to anyone. I tell things how I see them. And what I saw on Saturday (Australian time) was extraordinary, marvellous, wonderful, enchanting, exciting, moving and pickyourownsuperlative. I know that some will pick disgustingrevoltingawful, in which case you may wish to stop reading now, because I will piss you off.
First, let me be clear. I am not particularly interested in sport. Nor do I have any liking for nationalism. But I love theatre, dance, music, representational diversity, technological innovation, artistic creativity and intellectual curiosity. So I loved, but loved, but loved, the Paris Olympics opening ceremony. I watched it in full on the small screen, partly because I had seen so many reports completely panning it and expressing outrage about the apparently ubiquitous drag queens. So I had to find out for myself. What I discovered was so extensively at odds with all the negative comments I had been reading that I now have to go into some detail to explore this disjuncture. So this post will be in two parts, and both somewhat longer than usual. Part 1 today. Part 2 when I get to it.
A difference of wavelength?
Olympics opening ceremonies have, as long as I can remember, been about celebrating the host nation’s culture and history. Perhaps French people watching the Sydney opening ceremony in 2000 were just as bemused by such things as yellow Globite cases, a stock horse dance, representations of Ned Kelly, Captain Cook with a giant rabbit or the very white-and-blond Olivia Newton-John and John Farnham singing a very twee song, as Australians appear to have been in 2024 by a mysterious wandering masked figure, pantomime-clad lovers flirting in the celebrated salle Richelieu of the national library, Lady Gaga with pink pompoms, headless singing Marie-Antoinettes, an over the top fashion parade or a blue Dionysus.
The Paris opening ceremony and the Sydney one did have something in common though: they combined moving and often inspiring celebration with tongue-in-cheek, even occasionally self-deprecating, references to national iconography. These ceremonies are spectacle, both for the host nation and for the rest of the world, and will be understood on different levels by different spectators.
For those of us watching on television (which is most of us), we are at the mercy of carefully curated versions as well. For example, the televised package of the French opening ceremony did not show the Algerian team throwing red roses in the Seine as they passed under the St Michel bridge, to commemorate the massacre of hundreds of Algerians during a demonstration for Algerian independence on 17 October 1961. Hundreds of bodies were found floating near the Pont St Michel and no members of the police were ever prosecuted. It took fifty years for the French state to formally acknowledge this crime, although stopping short of calling it a crime committed by the State. A bronze commemorative plaque was installed on the bridge on the occasion of the 40th anniversary in 2001, and in 2019 a steel plaque was added, showing silhouettes of some of the victims. It is unsurprising that we were not shown the rose-throwing moment in the opening ceremony, but there are videos of it all over social media and reports in the French press.
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We do not know what else may have been edited out of the televised version. However, what was there was impressive. Not perfect, and I did not like all of it (I am not a fan of male rappers for a start, and no, dear readers, drag queenery is not my preferred performance style, but context is all: more on that in Part 2), and some was less well executed than perhaps hoped, due to both the rain and to the lack of opportunity to rehearse in situ (because of the requirement not to disclose parts of the ceremony before the night). However, if one waits for perfect one will die regretting a waste of a life.
Perhaps one has to understand French culture and its history, and the city of Paris, to “get it”, just as Australians who understood Australian history and culture and the city of Sydney maybe “got it” better than others in 2000. Or perhaps the Anglo world simply has to get over its historical loving-to-hate the French.
Whatever the reasons for dissing the opening ceremony, I am finding the reactions difficult to comprehend. Some women claim that all they saw was an endless parade of drag queens (I saw but a few out of some 3,000 performers, and in a limited part of the spectacle), others focused on a male classical dancer’s wardrobe malfunction (when part of his tackle appeared to escape his shortie-short shorts as he posed in a tableau, which in fact was not true, it was a tear in his tights that gave a false impression), while others again whinged about the rain. Well, Macron may think he’s Jupiter (see a previous post) but even he cannot control the weather. Any open air event, anywhere, is subject to such risks and short of people being put in physical danger, it would have been difficult to justify cancelling such a huge event in which so much was invested, in both financial and human terms.
I will return to the brouhaha around the drag queens (and the wardrobe malfunction), among other things, in Part 2, but first, I’d like to walk you through some of the cultural codes of the opening ceremony and why they took my breath away.
Sequana’s children
First, the choice of the Seine. The river is the city’s heartbeat. It is mythologically a living being: the goddess Sequana, of Celtic origin but subsequently adopted by the Romans who colonised Gaul as everyone, I trust, knows—if only because you once read Astérix comics (themselves a delight of plays on words and tongue-in-cheek cultural references). She is the goddess of healing and of the granting of wishes.
Sequana, in her Greco-Romanised version, was the daughter of Bacchus (Dionysus—more on him in Part 2). Pursued by Neptune (Poseidon) who wanted to seduce her, Sequana called upon both her father and her old friend Ceres (Demeter), whom Sequana had helped bring her daughter Proserpina (Persephone) back from the underworld. Following so far? Exhausted by the chase, Sequana turned herself into a river, which took on the emerald colour of her eyes. That river is the Seine, which is almost 775 kilometres long, and the Seine’s tributaries were formed by the other nymphs from Sequana’s Celtic source myth.
Paris is defined by its river, by its left and right banks, by its bridges, its barges, its islands (Île de la Cité and Île St Louis), its bateaux mouches. It was built in the river basin, in an ever widening spiral that became its arrondissements of today. Its major institutional and historical landmarks are almost all close to the river.
Where better to hold an opening ceremony? An audacious choice, but as Australian rugby league star and commentator Matthew Johns put it, “Not very sure about doing the opening ceremony on the water, but what do you do ... the French, they’re oppositional” (cited by Nine online). Indeed.
That word—“oppositional”—perhaps best describes some aspects of the opening ceremony. At the best of times, France is unlikely to do what the Anglosphere expects of it, and what’s more, right now Paris is very much inclined to tell conservatives and opponents of anything diverse and innovative where to get off. The French far right was as much in the sights of the organisers as was the world audience. Olympics opening ceremonies play to both the home crowd and the international crowd, and as the world’s most visited tourist destination, Paris was going to strut its stuff, was going to highlight its architectural, historical and cultural iconography, and was going to do so provocatively and with panache.
Oddly, one comment I saw in social media was that the opening ceremony was “Americanised”, possibly because of a televised sequence featuring the Minions (which are actually a French creation), or the much-publicised appearance of Lady Gaga. I cannot imagine why else this comment was made. From the accordionist at the beginning and the intro music to Edith Piaf’s celebrated song “La Foule”, along with the display of pink-clad people and images (and can can dancers) recalling another celebrated Piaf song “La Vie en Rose”, to Joan of Arc galloping down the river on a magnificent mechanical silver horse and a superb light show radiating from the Eiffel Tower—or the ten wonderful women (including feminists)—celebrated in golden statues rising from the river (more on those next time)—it was definitely a French show, and particularly Parisian.
Even the US star sang in French (although prerecorded) early in the ceremony, performing a classic by beloved music hall star Zizi Jeanmaire: “Mon truc en plume” (“My feather thing”). Trained in classical ballet, where she started her performance career, Jeanmaire subsequently turned to musical theatre and “Mon truc en plume”, itself somewhat tongue in cheek, became legendary.
Fluctuat nec mergitur
Paris even foregrounded its historical and more recent destruction and rebuilding, as dancers and acrobats performed a homage to the workers who are rebuilding Notre Dame after the catastrophic fire of 2019, and images of Marie-Antoinette holding her head and singing appeared in the windows of the Conciergerie, followed by a bursting of streamers representing rivers of blood. Along with a heavy metal band, a soprano on a boat and a human tableau.
Yes, there was a lot going on in the Conciergerie arrangement. At the time of the Terror during the French revolutionary decade, 2,780 prisoners were incarcerated there, later to be guillotined. Marie-Antoinette was among them. It was indeed a blood-soaked time. Hence the bloodthirstiness of the lyrics of the Marseillaise (French national anthem, written as a revolutionary hymn by Rouget de Lisle)—which does in fact evoke rivers of “impure” blood running in the city’s gutters—notwithstanding the beauty of its opening-ceremony rendition by mezzo-soprano Axelle Saint-Cirel, perched atop another Paris icon, the Grand Palais. (The guillotine itself is named for its inventor, one Dr Guillotin, who developed it as a more “humane” way to put people to death because instantaneous. By the way, French slang for beheading is se faire raccourcir, “to be shortened”. Well yes, by some 20 centimetres or so.) The Conciergerie, which adjoins the Palais de Justice (still Paris’s central courthouse), continued to function as a prison until 1934 when it was definitively closed.
As for the human tableau, it incarnated a celebrated painting by Delacroix, “Liberty leading the people”, which today hangs in the Louvre. The painting was not about the 1789 revolution but about the 1830 uprising, called diversely les Trois Glorieuses (three glorious days), the second French revolution and the July revolution. Sorry readers, can’t go into more detail than that, or we’ll be here all day. You’ll have to look it up.
One thing I can tell you, though, is that the painting has become even more iconic since its evocation after the Charlie Hebdo massacre of 7 January 2015. During one of the many demonstrations in the wake of the assassinations, a man stood atop a statue of Marianne (symbol of the Republic) in Place de la Nation, wielding a large pencil, in memory of Charlie caricature artist Cabu, who was one of the victims. The photos taken of the pencil-wielder were dubbed “The pencil leading the people”.
There would be hardly anyone who was living in France in 2015 and of an age to comprehend the events, who doesn’t know about this photo, and the painting it evokes.
The heavy metal band Gojira (the first heavy metal band to perform at an Olympics opening ceremony), perched on ledges in front of the Conciergerie, sang the iconic revolutionary song “Ah! Ça ira” while soprano Marina Viotti passed by on a boat singing “L'Amour est un oiseau rebelle” (love is a rebel bird), better known in English as the habañera from Bizet’s opera Carmen. On her boat is the Parisian motto “Fluctuat nec mergitur” (which was also visible on the Austerlitz bridge at the beginning of the parade route): Paris floats but does not sink. It’s all about revolt and revolution. Paris has been the site of a few. And rebuilding after destruction, after tragedy. Paris has seen its share of those too.
Why am I telling you all this? Because the City of Light (so named because it was the first European city to use gas street lighting) has a long and complex history, and the constant interplay between classical and popular culture, between its long history and more contemporary events, can only call for a complex opening ceremony. The complexity was surely heightened by the fact that the ceremony was not contained in one place, and I understand that it may not be to everyone’s taste, but for me, that was part of the charm.
I can also understand why not everyone gets the layered cultural coding at first sight. Even I have looked through the video a few times. It’s an awful lot to take in. But this is Paris: it’s an awful lot to take in.
Part 2 coming soon…
Very good article but just one thing, and sorry to say it in French. Le danseur étoile avait des bas résilles qui ont craqué. Ce ne sont donc pas ses test*cules qu’on voyait, mais un bout de sa peau plus claire que le reste. C’était très net à l’écran sur une grande télé, et bcp moins sur les images qu’on voit partout sur internet. Well as we say in French, pas de quoi fouetter un chat