After Olympics Opening Ceremony death threats, Paralympics keep clear of politics

This ceremony felt all the more poignant for the absence of esoteric references to the Last Supper or a reimagined Dionysus

“Paradox,” they titled this opening ceremony. “From discord to concord.” It felt, in ways the organisers perhaps did not intend, like an apt billing. The wording was designed to convey a celebration of over 4,000 Paralympians’ discordant stories at Place de la Concorde, central stage of the French Revolution. And yet it also reflected the path taken by the choreographers of this Parisian summer. After the uproar detonated by the Olympic version’s apparent pastiche of the Last Supper, this three-and-a-half-hour spectacular stuck to a far safer recipe, scrupulously avoiding any lampooning of Christianity and keeping subliminal messaging to a minimum.
It is difficult to overstate the bombardment that Thomas Jolly, artistic director of Paris 2024, has experienced in the 34 days since he signed off on a tableau that seemed to mock Leonardo Da Vinci’s mural by using drag queens to mimic the 12 apostles. He has filed a complaint with French prosecutors for death threats, claiming to have been the target on social media of “messages containing threats and insults critical of his sexual orientation and wrongly-presumed Israeli roots”. While Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, has fiercely defended him, insisting the city would “always stand alongside artists”, there was pressure here not to pour further fuel on the fire.
Alexander Ekman, the Swedish ballet specialist appointed to orchestrate these latest theatrics, duly obliged, scripting a show that could not have been more quintessentially Parisian if his dancers had performed in berets. The winsome soundtrack to Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie was even used at one stage, not to mention Ravel’s Bolero. But the production did accentuate the iconic settings to startling effect, with the Paralympic flame borne down the Champs-Élysées and the Luxor Obelisk lit up in the blue, white and red of the Tricolore.
While it was stirring, ritualistic, sometimes downright surreal – especially during a “sportography” segment in which Ekman challenged the audience to decide whether they were watching a game or an art installation – it also kept a careful distance from controversy. For all that Jolly insisted he did not consciously deride any religion at the Olympics, the backlash has been bruising. And Ekman’s alternative rendering of the City of Light was proof that these affairs often work best when the laboured symbolism is stripped away.
There was still evidence of defiance. Barbara Butch, a French DJ who took part in the now-infamous drag queen sequence, carried the torch as part of the relay, saying: “I choose not to be afraid to exist in the public space. I know I represent France in the same way as anyone else.” Butch has described being the “recipient of tens of thousands of hate messages” since she took part in the ill-conceived stunt.
This instalment was conspicuously less provocative, with the ceremony dwelling less on contrived subtexts than on France’s evolving attitudes to disability. For all the lavish athletes’ parade across the Tuileries Garden, there had been acute concerns about Paris’ readiness to stage these Paralympics. Only one of the city’s 16 metro lines, for example, is fully wheelchair-accessible. Even as Emmanuel Macron declared the Games open, Anna Landre, a disability justice advocate, posted a photograph suggesting that the entire wheelchair viewing platform had been taken up by non-wheelchair users.
Still, Andrew Parsons, president of the International Paralympic Committee, heralded this moment as a potential sea change. “Through their performances, Paralympic athletes will challenge stigma, alter attitudes, redefine the limits of what you think is possible,” he said. “The Games will show what people with disabilities can achieve at the highest level when the barriers to succeed are removed. The fact that these opportunities largely exist only in sport in 2024 is shocking. That is why, 225 years on from the French Revolution, I hope Paris 2024 starts a Paralympic revolution.”
By any measure, this was the most elaborate framing of the Paralympic story ever conceived. Place de la Concorde was transformed into a giant open-air theatre, with Musa Motha, the South African leg amputee who featured in last year’s final of Britain’s Got Talent, performing a wondrous dance routine on crutches. All elements were deftly chosen, right down to the recital of La Marseillaise as a haunting, beautiful flute solo. Ekman did take full advantage of the one unconditional triumph of the Olympics opening: that blazing balloon, once again rising high into the night sky as an airborne cauldron. There were no Last Supper allusions, no bizarre reimaginings of the Greek God Dionysus as a giant blue smurf. And the absence of those high-concept fripperies made, all told, for a far more poignant spectacle.