Ballet de Lorraine’s Tristan Ihne has been dancing professionally for practically 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 most effective half for me was to really feel the vitality of the group,” he says. “Right here we have been along with generations blended and coaching kinds blended. It was superb.” He’d by no means taken half in such a big efficiency, or danced for such a large international viewers. “There’s nothing to check it to,” he says.
That group vitality led not solely to a memorable spectacle but in addition to a unique form 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 have been being paid for broadcast rights diverse extensively—from 60 to 1,600 euros. The protesting dancers additionally needed 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 a number of the calls for, and the dancers dropped their menace 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 larger points surrounding the Video games. “I might have appreciated to have a strike in regards to the rights of lots of people in Paris that have been utterly distorted,” she says, highlighting the hundreds with out everlasting housing who have been despatched out of Paris forward of the Video games.
Nonetheless, she was completely satisfied to participate within the ceremony—even when not every little thing went precisely to plan. As an illustration, Brito says she and the opposite dancers of Retouramont have been speculated 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 brought about main issues specifically for dancers of the Moulin Rouge, who have been acting on a slick floor proper on the fringe of the river. “For us, it was okay as a result of we have been going to carry out within the water anyway,” Ihne says. “However for different dancers, it made it harder—I give them much more credit score.”
Brito says that for her and lots of the dancers, any additional challenges have been value it to participate in a ceremony that made such a press release. “Politically, it was fairly necessary 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 exhibiting folks of each colour, each physique sort, and each gender.”
