STINSON: OPENING WAS GREEN AFFAIR
In an understated affair, Brazil sends strong environmental message
Ask a guy who makes small, compelling, artsy films to design the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games, and he’s not going to hand you a teeth-rattling, bombs-exploding blockbuster.
And so it was that the Games of the XXXI Olympiad officially opened in Rio de Janiero on Friday night, with a presentation from creative director Fernando Meirelles that intentionally departs from the bombast that often appears in such things into an understated affair that told the story of Brazil and, somewhat fittingly for the planet’s greenhouse, asked the world to treat it better.
Meirelles, best known for the films City of God and The Constant Gardener, had said this week that Donald Trump wouldn’t like his show — he gloated that Trump wouldn’t like it, really — and then he delivered a ceremony that sent message after message about the health of the planet. Some messages were subtle, like the intentionally small cauldron lit at the climax of the ceremony.
Others were much more overt — all the athletes who entered Maracana Stadium planted a seed packet into a mirror that will be transported to the Olympic venues in Deodoro, where they will be used to eventually grow a new forest. Still others came off almost like a dare, such as the repurposing of the universal symbol for peace into one that asked for peace not on Earth, but with Earth. In the opening moments, the peace sign was flipped upside down and turned green to resemble a tree.
“By transforming the peace symbol, Brazil reinvents it,” said notes provided to the media before the performance. “This is the new peace we want. Peace with the sole planet we own.”
Sure, but could we also have that and the normal kind of peace? It’s not as if we’ve sorted that part out entirely at this point in human existence. But, whatever. The notes said Meirelles accepted the creative director gig to “send a wake-up call about the consequences caused by climate change and to talk about the importance of forests,” and he sure did. The message was not lost.
The creative directors — Meirelles led a team of three — also said they wanted “to change some paradigms of the Olympic ceremonies,” replacing “the hightech approach, the dependence on major electronic and mechatronic effects with an analogue inventiveness.”
This is fair enough, although it’s pretty easy to tout your commitment to a low-tech production when you have very publicly had your production budget slashed amid a national economic crisis. Meirelles said this week that the original budget of US$114 million for the opening and closing ceremonies had been cut by more than half, requiring the number of performers and staff to be trimmed from 3,000 to 700. He said his budget was a 12th the size of that for the ceremonies of the past summer Games in London.
But given that the economic crisis in Brazil is very real, there was something quite appropriate about a low-key opening to Rio 2016. The director said, reasonably, that overspending here would have been “tacky.”
“When 40 per cent of the homes in Brazil have no sanitation, you can’t really be spending a billion for a show.” He has a point there. And in the end, it’s never the showy numbers that anyone remembers, unless, as happened in Vancouver, something breaks. Friday night’s ceremony didn’t lack for memorable moments, from the recreation of the rain forest, using performers pulling giant rubber bands, at the centre of Maracana, to the depictions of European settlers — and the subsequent arrival of African slaves — on Brazil’s forested shores. A segment that depicted the growth of the country’s cities, complete with acrobats dancing and flipping across the rising skyscrapers, was similarly visually compelling.
And as for the particularly subtle notes, there was supermodel Gisele Bündchen walking across the stage to the sounds of The Girl from Ipanema, played on piano by Daniel Jobim, the grandson of Tom Jobin, who composed the famous song that is seemingly played at least once an hour in Rio bars today. Many of the 60,000 at Maracana joined in singing the song as Bündchen strolled the length of the stadium floor.
In the end, after the long athletes entrance, some speeches, and more talk about the warming planet — and helpful NASA photos depicting a melting polar ice cap and rising sea levels, perhaps just to rile up Trump — the ceremony built toward a rousing samba finish.
From a small start to a big ending with enough drums to shake a building that is notoriously loud — “they boo the moment of silence at Maracana,” interim president Michel Terner said this week — it evolved into the party that Rio hopes will last until the closing of the Games on Aug. 21.
Other than the entrance of the athletes, the highlight of which was the rousing cheer for the refugee team, and the closing, in which the Olympic cauldron was lit by a procession of Brazilian athletes ending with marathoner Vanderlei Cordeiro de Lima — soccer legend Pele was ill and couldn’t make it — it was a night with little mention of sports, which is odd for the world’s largest sporting event. But there is plenty of time for those, one supposes, over the next 16 days.