From spectacular opening to the arenas, the focus shifts

0
149

It all started in Sydney with the first Games of the new millennium, in the year 2,000 – with turning the opening ceremony into a great socio-cultural gala. Athens 2004, with its myths and legends, topless Minoan princess, the Ancient Olympics and the majestic ruins of Parthenon providing the perfect backdrop, had the benefit of all the right ingredients to make the centenary of the modern Olympic Games memorable. Beijing 2008 yet surpassed it with comfort – its sheer power and precision daring London to pick up the heavy gauntlet. London and the creative genius of Danny Boyle did pick it up. And with such aplomb – in the process rolling out a most magical, a most wholesome evening with performances seamlessly intertwining history, culture, music, literature, Industrial Revolution and post-modern age spanning well over four and a half hours, with its nearly one hour prelude of rural ‘Green and Pleasant Land’ part not even telecast.
Despite its accent on sound, lights and drama which is a prerequisite for such pageants compelled it to flaunt every British ‘brand’ from Bond to Beckham, yet it brought out the essence and ethos of ‘the Isles of Wonder’ with subtlety and humour that is so ostensibly British. The rural sequence with sheep, ducks, shire ponies, stone hamlets, and the busy village green awash with cricket and football games gave way to the rising chimneys and all other manifestations from a land that was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and onwards to the post-modern age – one elaborate and humongous paraphernalia was wrapped up and removed from the middle with efficiency and rapidity that perhaps matched the Great Britain’s (mostly) orderly retreat from its colonies starting in the late 1940s from the sub-continent.
All that is good and great, and the boisterous and humorous too (Rowan Atkinson’s sublimely hilarious impersonation of Mr. Bean, and prior to it enacting a training scene on the beach from the classic British movie Chariots of Fire had the audience in splits), about Britain’s land and people got showcased – save the splendor of its conquests across continents and its mastery over vast swathes of lands and seas as its colonies for a couple of centuries. The lines from Shakespeare’s The Tempest that had provided Boyle with the seminal inspiration for the ceremony – ‘Be not afear’d/The isle is full of noises’ – were intoned, and so were segments from Blake and Milton. JK Rowling, creator of Harry Potter on ‘a rare public appearance’, read out opening paragraph of JM Barrie’s classic ‘Peter Pan’. Yet no mention of Queen Victoria’s poet laureate, the inimitable Rudyard Kipling and his famed ‘White Man’s burden’doctrine.
Despite this bit of selective amnesia, the Raj and the colonies did succeed in sneaking in, albeit in an oblique manner. Akram Khan (‘London Born’,stresses the brochure introducing ‘Performers and production team’, to parents of Bangladeshi origin) choreographed the dance and music on the moving hymn ‘Abide with Me’. Though the hymn’s ‘indelible association with sport’ is undeniable, it also happened to be the favourite of ‘that naked faqir’, Mahatma Gandhi.
Propelled by £27m and 7,500 volunteers, egged on by an ardent nation desirous of reliving its glorious achievements and above all by his own supreme creative genius, Danny Boyle produced a spectacular opening to remember. With that behind us, the business part of the Games commenced Saturday – with contests in as many as 19 sports taking place across 21 venues. The focus has shifted: on Friday the athletes from 204 nations, all 10,000 of them were mere props, the best of them mere bystanders, their parade an irksome interlude. Now it is they who hold the centre stage.