I have just finished watching the recording I made of the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics, and I can only echo Sebastien Coe's words in his speech as the President of the Olympic Association, and central to the bid itself, in that my most immediate feelings are a sense of Pride in being British.
The opening ceremony was always going to be difficult, following in the footsteps of the remarkable Beijing ceremony four years ago.
But I can speak as someone that went to school in Stratford itself for part of my education, just a few hundred yards away from where the amazing development has taken place in which the games will be hosted, and in which the opening ceremony took place last night.
I am immensely proud of what has taken place, and I suppose I speak as someone brought up in precisely that part of London, which is now so much in the world's eye.
The point was well made by presenters at the end of the nearly four hour event, it was bold, British, barmy, and brilliant.
There were numerous moments when I was completely moved by what was presented, and I was continually surprised at how the whole event unravelled.
There are too many memorable moments to mention, and no doubt many people unfamiliar with the particularities of British culture and social history will have missed the numerous intimate details.
But what no one can have missed is the sense of spectacle, and the scale of the spectacular.
I have had the good fortune to have met in meetings with the Artistic Director Ruth Mackenzie, when she was the Artistic Director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse and I was a humble Education Officer at Opera North, also based in Leeds.
I have known her to be a great visionary, and well deserved with a reputation for working well with communities of ordinary people to manufacture something of great artistic merit.
In my professional life, I was for five years the Director of an Arts Trust concerned with the regeneration of a coastal town in the East of England, and my remit in that role was to create through community engagement multimedia projects, with substantial funding from The Arts Council of England and from many other sources.
And so I suppose I watched the celebration with a professional eye, and I was certainly impressed.
Mixing the range of disciplines that the event did is not straightforward at all.
And the fact that so many of the participants were not professionals but members of the community is just amazing.
It is unfortunate that it did not start until 9 PM, which is typically when I go to sleep, and unfortunately though I tried to watch the whole event live, I only managed to watch it until about 10:15 PM, perhaps because so many people were watching online and my normally reliable broadband connection was just not up to it.
But I am so pleased that I recorded the nearly four hours it took, and I have watched all of it today.
Last night, I only reached the part where it appeared that the Queen and James Bond, in the guise of Daniel Craig, parachuted into the stadium.
This film component of the celebration was inspired, and perhaps is testament to the fact that Denny Boyle is a filmmaker, and he was the Director with overall responsibility for the event.
He has certainly added to his reputation with this extraordinary beginning to the 2012 games.
But everything about it, from the design of the torch that has travelled 12,000 miles around the country to the amazing theatrical impact of the Olympic Cauldron in the stadium, was just stupendous.
Anyone that hasn't seen it should certainly try to catch the first one and a half hours, and perhaps then the final 15 minutes or so when the Olympic oaths were taken, and the event formerly opened after the lighting of the Olympic Cauldron.
It has been memorably emotive, expressive of so many values that we would wish could be more universal in the world.
I hadn't quite realised that London is the only city to have played host to the games three times since the games were reinstated in the modern era by Baron De Couperin at the end of the 19th century.
Something special is happening, and its commencement has been memorably special too.
No comments:
Post a Comment