The Paralympics are under special scrutiny. Since they were launched in Rome in 1960, the competition for international athletes with disabilities has been an event whose core brand is the connection between sport and socio-political concerns.
When the ceremony begins on Wednesday evening at the venerable Place de la Concorde in Paris, the 50,000 spectators can look forward to seeing what message will be sent out from France in the age of politically charged sporting events.
It was already clear in advance that the organizers, especially the International Paralympic Committee (IPC), were aware of the evening’s appeal. Head of organization Tony Estanguet and French director Thomas Jolly have not tired of emphasizing the importance of the para-sports event in recent weeks.
Jolly, a mischievous, excited thespian, had previously organized the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games and positioned himself with an aggressively queer aesthetic. His opening ceremony for the Paralympics will also be held for the first time not in a stadium, but in the middle of the city.
Vincent Busche writes for the Paralympics newspaper and reports on the Summer Games in Paris as part of a ten-person team.
Leading a Paralympic opening ceremony aesthetically is a task that should not be underestimated. What is considered the ideal of beauty in the Western world and has been the norm in the performing arts business ever since is still based at its core on an idealized Renaissance body image. People with disabilities are marked as being out of line per se.
A politically ambitious choreographer is therefore faced with the challenge of staging the so-called visibility of people with disabilities in such a way that it creates a spectacle that will entertain millions of viewers in front of their screens for hours. So much for the difficulties.
Happy anarchic crowd
The conditions for the four-hour Wednesday evening in Paris are by no means unfavourable. Unlike at the opening of the Olympic Games, there is no heavy rain, and the spectators who have travelled to the stadium enter the open air and the pleasant evening sun, which beautifully illuminates the imposing sandstone temples of downtown Paris.
Interplay of skillful physical contortion and disharmonious tones True to the motto of the evening, “Paradox”, which was announced in advance by the organizers, the event, which is quite expensive with ticket prices of around 400 euros, starts off shrill and confrontational. This continues after the entry of the delegations around the German flag bearers Edina Müller and Martin Schulz.
The Paralympics Newspaper
This text was written as part of the Paralympics Newspaper – an internationally award-winning Community project by Tagesspiegel and DGUV. Here you will find the PDF the edition for the Summer Games in Paris.
The tenor on stage: the black, masked majority society is averse to a colorfully dressed group of people with disabilities. The common thread shows how the group, initially dressed in dark clothes, gradually engages with the people with disabilities, who increasingly start dancing and choreographing themselves, until at midnight it culminates in a white-clad, cheerfully anarchic crowd. There is wild celebration, crutches and glittering wheelchairs fly through the air in the darkness of the approaching night.
Encouraging and proud messages
The artistic team has certainly succeeded in aestheticizing para-sports. Despite all these efforts to create an artistic, social opposition, the evening’s length is particularly noticeable in that it takes place in the cosmos of a completely economized Olympic bubble. In a fetishized approach to the Paralympic flame, the torch changes hands five times on the Place de la Concorde alone. In addition, there are countless radio numbers that the French musician DJ Mud plays during the entrance of the 164 delegations to keep the audience entertained.
Fetishized handling of the Paralympic flame In their speeches, IPC President Andrew Parson and Tony Estanguet both emphasise the society-changing power of the Paralympics, even speaking of a “revolution of inclusion” that will begin as a result of the event. In videos, people with disabilities express encouraging and proud messages about life with an impairment. But they also criticise the status quo and the stigmas they are exposed to.
More about the Paralympics
Ferda Ataman and Jürgen Dusel in conversation “In the 1980s we would probably have been sent to a special school” Ukrainian swimming star Maksym Krypak “I am afraid for my life” The classification at the Paralympics “There are always athletes who cheat”
The result is an evening that confidently faces up to its political responsibility, both artistically and organizationally. There are some vague elements in terms of content and many musically overloaded elements – and of course four hours is much too long. But during this evening in late summer in Paris, a surprising amount of successful and powerful storytelling was told.
The games begin with a call for inclusion and destigmatization of life with disabilities!
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