Ballet de Lorraine’s Tristan Ihne has been dancing professionally for almost 20 years. However on July 26, he gave a efficiency in contrast to any he’d performed earlier than: Together with about 200 different dancers, he danced atop a golden platform stuffed with water subsequent to the Seine river in an 8-minute piece by Maud Le Pladec, as a part of the Olympic Opening Ceremony in Paris.
“The very best half for me was to really feel the power of the group,” he says. “Right here we had been along with generations combined and coaching types combined. It was wonderful.” He’d by no means taken half in such a big efficiency, or danced for such a large world viewers. “There’s nothing to check it to,” he says.
That group power led not solely to a memorable spectacle but in addition to a special sort of French custom: the specter of a strike, filed by the French performing artists’ union SFA-CGT. When the dancers started rehearsing collectively a couple of days earlier than the ceremony, they realized the quantity they had been being paid for broadcast rights diversified broadly—from 60 to 1,600 euros. The protesting dancers additionally wished touring and housing bills paid for. “The collective settlement specifies that in case you rent somebody coming from greater than 40 kilometers away, they need to get their bills coated,” says Ihne, who participated within the protests. Ultimately, occasion organizers met among the calls for, and the dancers dropped their risk to strike.
Dancer Magali Brito—a performer with aerial dance troupe Compagnie Retouramont, which carried out through the ceremony on the scaffolding of the Notre Dame Cathedral and with the heavy-metal band Gojira in beheaded Marie Antoinette costumes—says that whereas she feels for the dancers, their increase appeared comparatively minor in comparison with greater points surrounding the Video games. “I might have favored to have a strike in regards to the rights of lots of people in Paris that had been fully distorted,” she says, highlighting the 1000’s with out everlasting housing who had been despatched out of Paris forward of the Video games.
Nonetheless, she was completely satisfied to participate within the ceremony—even when not every part went precisely to plan. As an illustration, Brito says she and the opposite dancers of Retouramont had been alleged to be suspended alongside the partitions of the constructing through the Gojira live performance. “However after safety issues, they didn’t authorize us to be hanging on the partitions, so we simply did some poses within the home windows with costumes,” she says.
There was additionally the notorious rain through the ceremony, which triggered main issues particularly for dancers of the Moulin Rouge, who had been acting on a slick floor proper on the fringe of the river. “For us, it was okay as a result of we had been going to carry out within the water anyway,” Ihne says. “However for different dancers, it made it tougher—I give them much more credit score.”
Brito says that for her and lots of the dancers, any additional challenges had been value it to participate in a ceremony that made such a press release. “Politically, it was fairly essential to have the ability to take part on this occasion,” she says. “In France, we simply had new elections, and it felt good to have the ability to participate in one thing displaying individuals of each coloration, each physique sort, and each gender.”
