In French, the word for stage, “scène,” sounds exactly like the name of the river that runs through Paris.
The Seine.
That’s one of the first things the director Thomas Jolly liked about the idea of creating an opening ceremony that would float through the heart of Paris.
For the past two years, the river has become his workroom, offering challenges unknown to most theater directors: currents and wind tunnels, a vulnerable fish hatchery, a plan for thousands of athletes to float through in boats, 45,000 police officers scattered around for security. Also required: regular check-ins with the French president and Paris mayor.
As artistic director of all four Olympic and Paralympic ceremonies, he also has perks most directors could only dream of: a budget of nearly $150 million and more than 15,000 workers, including dancers and musicians. He can also expect a live audience of half a million and 1.5 billion spectators on television.
If Jolly pulls it off, this will be the first time an opening ceremony is unfurled outside the secure confines of a stadium. The Seine has not seen such a celebration in 285 years, since King Louis XV celebrated the marriage of his daughter to the prince of Spain.
If he doesn’t pull it off … well, we won’t talk about that. For all his confidence, anxiety has become Jolly’s constant partner and fuel.
“Everything is new here. I don’t have a model to work from,” he said in an interview. “It’s creation in the extreme.”
Jolly has managed to keep the ceremony’s script secret, to maintain a sense of surprise and, he hopes, wonder. But there have been hints. President Emmanuel Macron said it would offer a “great story of emancipation and freedom” — from the French Revolution to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was signed in 1948 at the spot where the ceremony ends. Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, said the ceremony would be playful, with a message of the city’s “openness to the world and the pleasure of diversity.”
Before he was picked for the job, Jolly dreamed of delegations arriving by hot air balloon, a French invention, and of the heads of dead kings rising from the Seine to watch the ceremony. Now, he will say only that the main themes are love and “shared humanity.”
What is clear is that the performance will include 12 scenes along, above and even rising out of the river, intermingling with a parade of 10,000 athletes in around 90 boats. It will start at 7.30 p.m., using mostly the late sunset of summer for lighting, and will last over three and a half hours. Sightings of Celine Dion and Lady Gaga in Paris this week have led to speculation, but Jolly would not confirm the names of any performers in the show. Nor would he comment on the floating skateboard ramps that can be glimpsed between security fences shielding the river.
In a country that loves structure and regulations, Jolly is considered a rule breaker and an original thinker who takes risks. He loves Shakespeare as much as the Spice Girls, and he recently directed a popular French rock opera, “Starmania,” bombarding the audience with 600 strobe lights and drawing more than a million spectators during a nationwide tour. He also directed and acted in a 24-hour production that brought together “Henry VI” and “Richard III” — 10 acts in one sitting. The theater put out pillows so spectators could nap.
“The stage is almost too small for him,” said Joëlle Gayot, a theater critic for Le Monde newspaper who has followed Jolly’s career from the beginning. “He overflows the borders. He’s voracious. But what’s interesting is he’s also very deep.”
Jolly, 42, grew up in a small village in Normandy on the outskirts of Rouen, the eldest of two children of a nurse mother and printer father who nurtured his passions for dolls and classical dance. In middle school, he was bullied, but he found theater a safe harbor where he was encouraged to tap into his deeper self and not to hide it.
“I learned you have to fight to remain free,” he said.
After theater school, he and a group of fellow actors formed a theater company, La Piccola Familia, which staged shows in small towns around the countryside. In 2020, he was named the head of the public theater in Angers, 180 miles southwest of Paris.
After he was hired by the Olympic Committee, Jolly commissioned four writers to help him draft a script: a medieval historian, an award-winning novelist, a screenwriter and a playwright. They traveled up and down the river on boats, brainstorming.
The 3.7-mile route had already been decided by the Paris 2024 Organizing Committee. It begins in the east, at the Gare d’Austerlitz, the train station that is the traditional gate to Paris, near the site of the old Roman settlement of Lutetia. Then it rolls past beloved relics of the Middle Ages, including the Cathedral of Notre-Dame and the Conciergerie, a former palace that became Marie-Antoinette’s prison before she was guillotined in the Place de la Concorde, which is along the route, too. Near the end of the course rise the totems of the world’s fairs that the city hosted more than a century ago, like the glass-domed Grand Palais and the Eiffel Tower.
“The city is built for this — to be a place where the world is supposed to come,” said Stephen Sawyer, a professor of political history at the American University of Paris. “There’s a reason why it’s such a photogenic city.”
The jumble and overlap of history along the banks make for a passionate stage design. “The history of France is this: a story that clashes, is rebuilt, then deconstructed,” Jolly said. “It’s enthralling.”
Once Jolly and his team had created the 12 scenes, he hired four subdirectors to help develop them through music, dance, sets and costumes. One was Daphné Bürki, an exuberant television host who was trained as a fashion stylist and started her career at Dior. She was in charge of designing 3,000 costumes.
Often, plans fell apart for unexpected reasons. Asbestos, for one: Jolly was told that performers could not lean out of the windows of the decommissioned Hôtel-Dieu hospital because it was packed with the substance, which can cause cancer. A fish hatchery by the Béthune Quay couldn’t be disturbed. Engineers nixed a plan for mass dancers on a bridge — their in-time tapping would have caused it to collapse, Jolly said.
“So I either had to change the site or change the choreography,” he said. By May, one scene had been reworked 73 times.
“I have never been so challenged in my life. I became an athlete of creativity,” said the ceremony’s head choreographer, Maud Le Pladec, who worked with 3,500 dancers — 400 in one sequence alone. “The ‘how’ was always there,” she said.
Both the president and the Paris mayor have taken a keen interest in the show, and Jolly had to meet with them regularly. Though he said they “didn’t interfere in the creative process,” Macron caused a stir when he met with the French Malian singer Aya Nakamura about performing an Édith Piaf song at the ceremony.
Mayor Hidalgo said she had assembled a committee, led by the historian Patrick Boucheron, to come up with the ceremony’s grand story and message before Jolly was hired. (Boucheron was also part of the team that worked on the script with Jolly while riding on boats.)
“It’s the artistic director who decides, but we can give our advice,” Hidalgo said. “You’re not going to forbid politicians to have ideas.”
Last week, Hidalgo swam in the Seine to celebrate that, after $1.5 billion in investments, the river will now be clean enough for Olympic races — as long as there isn’t a big rainstorm that overwhelms the city’s sewage system. Parisians have suffered through a cold and wet spring, and it rained again this week.
The weather is what makes Jolly most anxious, too. His team built software to cast the route in 3-D so he could visualize high and low water levels, rain, even storms.
“If the weather is nice and we have a golden hour as planned, on time, it will be absolutely wonderful and very, very beautiful. If it rains, then please send me a real summer storm, with lightning, noise and thunder, because that will be cinematic,” he said. “But if it’s gray and raining, then I will be really very unhappy.”
Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting
Read More: When the Paris Olympics Begin, the Seine Is His Stage
