Its All One Opening Ceremony

Shopping Malloompahloompics

As we eager and bright eyed audiences wait for the world-shattering edutainment served up in lieu of a measured and globally-inclusive Opening of the Games Ceremony, there seems a marked and growing inability to separate genuine in–depth theatrical skills from St Vitus Dance attention-seeking steeped in stadium-sized dollops of unearned emotion.

This is further exacerbated by the new dance/alternate circus “sector’ whose undoubted presence weighing in as they will with inconsequential, backwards justified and solipsistic philoso-lite explorations of just about any theme from mother-rape to hairy-eyeball Haiku. Much of this quaint hybrid of artertainment often accompanied by fun-fur clad frenzies bellowing what sounds like backwards Latin atop swaying poles to extraordinarily banal, derivative and highly synthesised rrrrrrrock muzik.

While this is all very diverting and occasionally rent-paying for said swayers, decibel peddlars and their billionaire Cirque promoters in Montreal, a group of quaintly bespectacled and other Magnificent Pretenders are about to be paid millions by us grateful UK debt-slaves to find eye-wateringly banal and expensively costumed ways to shoe-horn this dross, dressed as Avatars For Britain, into many of the upcoming Olympic Games opening conceits,
This does very little for the development either of genuine and evolutionarily creative theatrical notions or the ability to distinguish between the talented and the noisesome.

The gradual and necessary development of an aesthetic, informed by skill, taste, depth, the evolution of vocabularies of choreographic movement-design, the great arts and myths of circus and commedia, fall increasingly in thrall to the perilously ill-informed and under-experienced as they hurl themselves, with quantities of jejune optimism, headlong into the role of taste-makers and creatives for the art and performance departments at UK plc Towers.

It is now a recognised career-choice development process to be splurged out of one of the contemporary dance/Theatre schools with a requisite Ology in Whatever, struggle around in the shallows of the Dependent Dancin'N'That sector until the money, the ideas and relief yoga/pilates teaching opportunities dry-up, then schlepp off to one of the Netheroutlandish Opera companies. Here we discover a disheartening prevalence of Euro-subsidised cavorting in twelve nippled fat-suits and bald-wigs to conceptual-Mozart in bad lighting, much of which I fear we might get at The Games opening, with Kylie, Take Drugs and sundry other boilerplated cuties filling in on the fags, ads and pee breaks.

Not only will the Emperor be butt-naked face down in the long-jump pit, but crows will be pecking at his eyes.
Across all creative disciplines and now "Inter-disciplines", a growing coterie of Sunday supplement creatives are half new-minting the old as their own genuine novel discoveries.
A cursory glance at any Arena Event, guarantees more and more whizzing and blinding to less and less effect. In the kingdom of those with CCTV lights in their eyes, the Personality Spekkie prevails.

This person has identified that the 21st century appetite for Fries, Circuses and Disco-pulp is morphing into a voracious and indiscriminate consumption of Crativeprojex, Events and Spectaculars running the gamut from Britney Spears Laundry Basket - The Opera to Olympic Opening ceremonies, accompanied as they often are, by yards of windy academically self-referential theoro-technocratic guff in our mainstream media and supported up the whazoo by Sponsors and advertising industry panderers.

This betrays a worrying inability to tell the difference between creativity and increasingly high-profile valueless Kulcha dominated by those who have Government and Culture-media mandates to grow up on our time.

The great choreographer Mark Morris on being invited to yet another massively hyped navel-gazing “Works In Progress” exercise masquerading as culture in New York was overheard to say, “let me know when its finished and I’ll decide if I want to buy a ticket”.

What is perhaps more alarming is that this extraordinarily unfocused curate’s egg of what is ever more loosely termed, Entertainment, is increasingly being employed at the highest level of the theatrical Global-event world. This strikes me as a very badly missed opportunity.

Most of this rant is driven by the increasing doubt that anyone has carefully considered exactly what it is that we wish to present to the world in July 2012, outside the main focus of The London Olympic games.
There is every chance as WhateverItIs prances out into the Stadium limelight in all its bouncing, toothsome and experiential marketing eagerness, its actually not going to have a scooby-doo what it is doing there. Nor when the shouting has died down, will we.

BANG! the fireworks will go off, Graham Norton and Elton John as the Ugly Sisters will have a Shakespeare themed mock-joust in Tracy Emin branded golf-buggies to a deafening reprise of Pinball Wizard played live by The Who the F.. Cares, bounced all over by Diversity and Half Of The Yoof of Tower Hamlets, and as any old jolly plumber might say, job done.

Pierre de Coubertain and his well meaning motivation in re-founding The Games, is to a large extent still alive and well in the Olympic Spirit. I fervently hope and have to assume his philosophy as far as it stretches to The Cultural Olympiad, is artfully graffitied on the polished brick walls in the doubtlessly well-appointed Olympic Party Events and Entertainment committees offices.

If we get the kind of stadium show we have been getting recently, then we cannot say we were not warned.