CLASSIC CULTURE
Opening ceremony offers taste of Russia’s historic past
As Russian TV star Yana Churikova, one of the two warm-up hosts, told the crowd before the opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympics began, “if your face comes on the screens, you should hug your neighbour!”
She paused, then added fauxsternly, “You should hug your neighbour! This is the law.”
As a metaphor for the ceremony — itself, by creative director Konstantin Ernst’s own words, all about “relatively simple metaphors” — it wasn’t half-bad.
This was a show for grown-ups, as befits a country which is, after all, thousands of years old and is periodically seized by revolutions, among them the Russian Revolution of 1917 and perestroika, circa 1985, which led to the collapse of the evil empire, as the late American president Ronald Reagan famously called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The near three-hour long show featured the most elegant grownup arts (ballet, classical music, with references to great Russian writers, dancers and painters) that stir the emotions yet eschew sentimentality — and was also slyly humorous.
Forty punishing years of the old USSR, for instance, went by in five minutes and never did anything from that time look so good.
Floating from the ceiling of the Fisht Olympic Stadium, purposebuilt for the ceremony and apparently nothing else, were giant sculptures, including a sickle, the entire segment bathed in red light, red also the traditional colour of the Communist Party.
The stadium ceiling was the source of some of the most spectacular effects — over the course of the show, it sent out a traditional troika, pulling a snowstorm behind it, into a snowstorm, sculptures of fish and sea creatures and for the finale, electrifying figures of athletes in action, snowboarding, playing hockey and skating.
At ground level came giant helium inflatables of brilliant colours which formed into a replica of the domes and towers of St. Basil’s Cathedral which sits on Red Square in Moscow, the gentry at an elaborate ball taken straight from Leo Tolstoy’s epic War and Peace, and the loveliest doves imaginable, played by leading Russian ballerinas dancing to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.
In shocking contrast to the usual fare served up on such occasions,
‘The task, set by Russian President Vladimir Putin, was ostensibly to present the world the brave new face of Mother Russia, and if it didn’t all go like clockwork, it came close enough.’
there was mercifully little kitsch and minimal amounts of folk-type dancing, peasant costuming and the like.
Even the 3,000 children and young people who took part — many of them gymnasts and dancers trained by Sebastien Soldevilla and Shana Carroll of Montreal’s famous circus company, Les 7 Doigts de la Main — were sophisticated and stylish, as opposed to merely cute.
The task, set by Russian President Vladimir Putin, was ostensibly to present the world the brave new face of Mother Russia, and if it didn’t all go like clockwork (early on, one of the five Olympic rings failed to light up), it came close enough.
Any displeasure Putin may have felt at that failure may have been assuaged by the presence in the ceremony, as one of the final Olympic torchbearers, of goldmedal winning rhythmic gymnast Alina Kabayeva, rumoured to be his girlfriend since his divorce last year.
(She was not, as apparently also had been rumoured, the torchlighter. That honour fell to triple gold medallist Irina Radnina and Russian hockey great, so wellknown and regarded in Canada after the 1972 hockey series, goaltender Vladislav Tretiak).
Other worst fears also failed to materialize.
Putin remained fully dressed and did not remove his shirt.
The closest thing to a terrorist act preceded the opening by a few hours, when a drunk and inept passenger in a track suit aboard a Pegasus Airlines flight reportedly tried to hijack the plane and divert it to Sochi. It safely made an emergency landing in Istanbul.
There were no protests against Russia’s new, Putin-driven antigay laws, or if there were, so minor they went unnoticed, as per the direction of IOC president Thomas Bach, who urged the world’s political leaders not to spoil the Games by putting that burden “on the backs of these athletes”.
Bach even made subtle approving reference to diversity.
It all worked out splendidly, and if the air was thick with irony well, as the Brits say, “T.I.R.”, short for This is Russia.