behind the scenes of the Olympic Games (episode 6/10)

The most publicized subject of the Paris 2024 Games? The opening ceremony on Friday July 26 which, for the first time, must be held not in a stadium, but in the heart of the city. The organization’s choice fell on a moving ceremony in and on the Seine, around a 12-kilometer loop between the Pont d’Austerlitz and the Pont d’Iéna. A project that has occupied minds for several years, emblem of an event that seeks originality.

The opening ceremony, emblem of the “disruptive” Games

Tony Estanguet: “Be bold”, “break through”, “break the codes”: I have used lots of expressions in my speeches since the start of the Paris 2024 adventure. [Rires.] Our DNA has always been to seek how to put the signature of French Games. The Games in the city, the ceremony on the Seineit is the perfect illustration of an idea: combining the best of our heritage with the best of sport and the Games was clearly not the easy option.

Thierry Reboul, executive director of brand, events and ceremonies Paris 2024: When the city of Paris was chosen to organize the Games, Tony Estanguet asked me if I was interested in following them. I had to sell my event box in three months, but it took me 12 seconds to understand that I would regret not accepting. He told me : “Build a story that makes people Paris games leave a trace.”And when you want to leave a mark, you have to create something unforgettable, and above all don’t do like the others. I have a culture of difference. It’s a serious childhood illness that I try to use for the benefit of my professional life. I had the idea for the opening ceremony on the Seine a few months after my arrival, and I continue to try to carry it out on a daily basis, despite all odds. The day I pitched the project, the first image of my presentation came from the son of Soupalognon y Crouton’s character in Asterix, that child who holds his breath if you tell him no. [Rires.]

Tony Estanguet: In general, I seek to understand and control things. When this is presented to me, my first instinct is to say: “Does your thing work? It’s a great idea, but are you sure about your move?”

Pierre Rabadan: Working groups on the feasibility of a ceremony on the Seine consulted for a year. A security group, a Seine group, a performance group and a city group met weekly. So the decision was carefully considered. All this did not happen overnight.

Tony Estanguet: Prefect Lallement [Didier Lallement, préfet de police de Paris de 2019 à 2022] was not completely with us, but he nevertheless agreed. In a case of this nature, politics is part of the strategy, we constantly find ourselves in a logic of compromise and negotiation.

Thierry Reboul: If we had wanted to impose this twenty years ago, we would have hit a wall. But we benefited from a favorable context for the IOC, which is nevertheless the opposite of an institution that moves quickly, the essence of Olympic Games being rather based on tradition. It turns out that the IOC had let the Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires in 2018 experiment with a ceremony outside the stadium. There was also the contribution of Tony Estanguet and the support of the City of Paris and the State, with people fond of this kind of idea, namely Mayor Anne Hidalgo and the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron. Very quickly, I toured the professions that could claim artistic leadership, in the fields of cinema, choreography and direction. I saw quite a few people, with the conviction that the specificity of the object required a person with a breaking vision, but who also mastered the subject of live performance, of performing arts. One day, a meeting goes particularly well with someone who has locked people in a theater for twenty-four hours to see Shakespeare. [en réalité plutôt dix-huit heures comme cela a été le cas pour la pièce Henri VI au Théâtre de l’Odéon, à Paris, en 2015]. This obviously interesting man is called Thomas Jolly. All of a sudden, there was a kind of symbiosis.

Thomas Jolly, director, actor and artistic director of the opening ceremony: My entry into the Paris 2024 project was quite funny. In November 2021, I received a call from the newspaper The Team. First of all, I’m surprised because I’m an actor and theater and opera director, so I don’t really see why a sports newspaper is asking for my testimony. The organization of Olympic Games had just announced that the opening ceremony would take place on the Seine, The Team therefore collected the testimony of artists on the mode: “What would you do ?“I expressed myself freely, throwing out crazy ideas: I said, among other things, that it would be great if delegations arrived from the suburbs and the ring road in amphibious buses that would cross the entire city to its heart . [Rires.] To my great surprise, I found myself with a double page in the sports daily. This article aroused the curiosity of Thierry Reboul. A few months later, he contacted me. Over the weeks, I meet Tony Estanguet, Anne Hidalgo, then the IOC. Finally, there is a vote and I am chosen unanimously. I couldn’t refuse. I come from public theater, whose philosophy is precisely to address an extremely large audience. There we are in the right place. The ceremony constitutes a moment when a very large number of people are synchronized – we speak of between one and two billion human beings looking at the same thing at the same time. This is unheard of, unprecedented, only the Olympic Games are capable of achieving this. This is the ideal time to promote some values, some questions that we can have in common about our shared humanity.

Thierry Reboul: With Thomas, we share a great desire for modernity. This ceremony is not the Puy du Fou. From the point of view of the design of the project and what it says, we strive to highlight certain values ​​that we want to defend, and we believe that these values ​​are shared by a majority of people. in today’s France.

Thomas Jolly: What is magnificent about France, its history tells us, its present repeats it to us and its future, I hope, will continue to perpetuate it, is that this country was built in response to other cultures and with influences from elsewhere. His story is constructed, deconstructed, reconstructed, questions. We have this tradition of taking to the streets to demonstrate. We are in perpetual motion and we are lively, I think. All this goes against the discourse on a “national identity” carried by certain political currents which seems to me not only dangerous, but above all not coherent with the history of this country. I want during this ceremony, France to be represented in all its richness, diversity and multiplicity.

Thomas Jolly first formed a team of authors to imagine the story conveyed by the opening ceremony. According to our information, the writer Leila Slimanithe screenwriter Fanny Herrero or the historian Patrick Boucheron participated in it during the year 2023. On the music side, Victor le Masnewho worked with Thomas Jolly on the new version of Starmania in 2022, was asked to punctuate the event.

Thomas Jolly: The authors come from cinema, novels, theater, human sciences… To develop this story, which is basically quite simple, we first went to immerse ourselves in the places where the ceremony will be held. We walked the quays, visited the monuments, revisited all the history that the Seine for so long. We then developed the main arcs of the story. Then, for what I call “translation” – that is to say the concrete implementation which is always in progress – I wanted jacks of all trades. My artistic direction had to be inclusive, with personalities from different worlds [plus de mille artistes participent à la cérémonie]. I am part of a generation that is opposed to the hierarchy of cultural objects. I find interest everywhere, in video games as well as in classical music.

Thierry Reboul: On what exactly we say, the effect of surprise is important, even if it is complicated to maintain it until the end when we have to do rehearsals in a situation… Let’s say that the ceremony tells about our universal values. This is not a historical spectacle. Along with structure, that’s the most important thing. I wanted to break the history of the stadium, and the creative team wanted to break the structure of a ceremony.

Thomas Jolly: Normally, the artistic part of around fifty minutes follows with two hours of parade of athletes and delegations, before an hour of protocol elements – the speeches, the athletes’ oath… I dared to say to Thierry Reboul that I found the ceremonies a little long and boring, and I proposed a new concept. From February 2023, the IOC asked me to work on a storyboard covering the first twenty minutes, to illustrate my principle. The latter has been validated and, currently, we are working in this direction.

Thierry Reboul: We are only doing one show where the parade, the show and the protocol mix… This will result in a hybrid, but complete, object of three and a half hours, which will reveal what a ceremony can be across a city. We worked on the content and the form to make it a completely different experience. On site, spectators will discover part of the spectacle depending on their position around the Seine, but the athletes will all pass in front of them. There will also be giant screens. What is interesting about a ceremony like this is that it really walks on two legs: the artistic leg and the logistical-productive leg. In a way, a stadium with several hundred thousand seats is being built over twelve kilometers along the Seine : these are the pyramids of Egypt.