A ceremony planned down to the last detail from June 2023
This Friday, we’ll get a 30-second taste of Opening Ceremony – a high-energy passage that blends contemporary and urban style. For the rest, we’ll have to let the dancers work on the steps and wait until July 26.
“There are rehearsals in sheds like this, but there are many others,” he explains Thomas Jolly, artistic director of ceremonies. “There will also be indoor rehearsals with larger venues because we can’t fit several hundred dancers here and we’ll be going into the venue at the last minute.”
With just a month left before the fateful date, everything is becoming real for the designer of this grand spectacle, who has been working on this project with his colleagues for over a year and a half.
“The ceremony was planned for June 2023,” he explains. “After that, there was a whole feasibility study phase for the resistance of bridges, piers, wind, currents… And since then we’ve been tweaking, tweaking, tweaking, until we’ve found the right harmony.”
Every detail has been studied to highlight the City of Light and sports in front of the millions of spectators and television viewers who will admire the spectacle on July 26.
“For the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, we will take advantage of all the historical monuments around the Seine and there will not be a single river bank or bridge that will not be filled with music, dance or performances. “, he explains Le Pladec. “We talk about dance, but there are also more visual tableaus, music, sports, etc.
With the inconsistent weather in early 2024 and the volatility of Paris weather, all kinds of climatic conditions must be considered for July 26: rain, storms, strong winds, heat waves… Nothing is left to chance in the planning of this ceremony.
“We know we’re not going to be able to control the weather, so we have to take that into account and find some form of flexibility,” says Jolly. “We have plans in case the current is a little stronger or a little weaker, and the ceremony will be adjusted according to the humidity levels. If there are sets that become slippery or dangerous, we will have to adjust those passages, but others will be maintained.”
“The ceremony has a flexible format depending on what we meet that night,” he continues. “We’ve anticipated everything, and it’s all customizable. It’s called live rendering for a reason, you have to work with what’s alive, meaning the real thing—the river, the sky.”