When the iconic London Eye turned into a giant Catherine Wheel as part of the spectacular New Year’s Eve firework display on the River Thames, TV stations round the world beamed pictures and said they heralded the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics. But the Games are not just about sport. London 2012 will be witnessing the biggest ever Cultural Olympiad as well, with over a thousand artistic events taking place all over the UK, drawing on global talent. It will also provide an opportunity to showcase Britain’s top creative work, from the huge Yorkshire landscapes of David Hockney exhibited at the Royal Academy to the early films of the late Alfred Hitchcock.
The French Baron Pierre de Coubertin, originator of the modern Olympic movement, which was resuscitated from the ruins of ancient Greece, ensured that the founding charter of the International Olympic Committee stipulated that the host country of the quadrennial Games must organise a programme of cultural events that should ‘highlight the shared values of sport and the Arts in terms of excellence, endeavour and achievement’ and ‘promote the Arts and culture of the host city and host nation while embracing an international cultural dimension’.
The London Cultural Olympiad actually started almost as soon as the 2008 Beijing Olympics finished, as UK organisers encouraged four years of artistic activities that will culminate in the London 2012 Festival, due to run from Midsummer’s Day (21 June) through till 9 September. This will be the UK’s largest ever nationwide festival, offering everyone the chance to get into the spirit of London 2012 through dance, music, theatre, the visual arts, film and digital innovation, as well as leaving a lasting legacy for the Arts in Britain.
One of the most dramatic (in every sense of the word) elements of this year’s Olympiad programme will be the World Shakespeare Festival, spanning seven months from April, not only in London and the bard’s birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon, but in numerous other UK locations, as well as online. The Festival will champion Shakespeare as a world playwright and to underline the point, each of the 37 plays that he wrote will be performed in a different language in often innovative adaptations, such as Much Ado about Nothing set in an Italian restaurant in Paris, a re-imagined Henry VIII in Spanish, and Pericles in Greek, all under the banner ‘Globe to Globe’. In addition, the acclaimed TR Warszawa’s production of Macbeth will be staged in Polish at the Edinburgh Festival and Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru’s Welsh-language version of The Tempest will feature at the Eisteddfod at Llandow in the Vale of Glamorgan. Amongst guest directors involved will be the Tunisian Lotfi Achour, who will be giving his own take on Macbeth: Leila and Ben – A Bloody History at the Northern Stage in Newcastle. According to the British Council, half of the world’s children study Shakespeare at school and the WSF Director, Deborah Shaw, has been seeing how he is dealt with abroad, in December visiting Baghdad for a read-through of Romeo and Juliet.
Music-lovers will be spoilt for choice, with concerts ranging from crowd-pleasing classical performances by Gustavo Dudamel and the youthful Simon Bolivar Orchestra from Venezuela to the avant-garde. As part of the Olympiad, 20 living British composers were commissioned to write 12-minute pieces, which vary from a new jazz suite from the Hackney Music Development Trust, celebrating black sports heroes, which can be caught at the Lilian Baylis Studio in London, to a performance inside Lowdham Grange prison in Nottingham in which inmates will unveil a work they have put together under the direction of Mark-Anthony Turnage and Irene Taylor. Literally more explosive will be a thunderous evening of sound, light and fire on Lake Windermere on Midsummer’s Night, executed by a French troupe of drummers, percussion and pyrotechnics, Les Commandeurs Percus.
Across the country, young people – both able-bodied and disabled – have been able to take part in creative workshops in dance and other performing Arts, one of the most ambitious schemes being ImagineAction in Northern Ireland. Forty participants in the age range 13 to 16 were recruited from various sports clubs there to work together under the guidance X-Factor maestro Louis Walsh and others, to produce a dance piece with a sporting theme. Also, during the week of 7 to 15 July, dance organisations around the country will host events in unusual venues, for all ages and covering the whole gamut from street dance to ballet, under the title Big Dance 2012, which aims to get millions of people up on their feet for the world’s biggest free dance party.
There is just so much happening over the coming months as part of Cultural Olympiad that it is hard to do justice to the programme in a brief overview. However, as with the Olympics, in which key athletic events tend to cause the most excitement, it would not be surprising if the Olympiad also produces some prime attractions. One of those is likely to be the BT-sponsored River of Music along the Thames on July 21 and 22, one week before the Opening Ceremony of the Games themselves and which is designed to welcome the world to London. Huge stages will be erected at various landmark sites along the river, each celebrating one continent: Africa in Jubilee Gardens, Asia in Battersea Park, Europe in Trafalgar Square and Somerset House, the Americas in the Tower of London, and Oceania at the Old Royal Naval College at Greenwich. The performances will be free and are designed to represent all 205 Olympic and Paralympic nations. Amongst the stars of pop and world music appearing will include Angelique Kidjo, Baaba Maal and the Scissor Sisters. Claire Whitaker, Director of Serious, the production company that is staging the event, enthuses, ‘This will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience not to be missed and a fabulous occasion for the whole family to enjoy.’
Ruth Mackenzie, Director of the Cultural Olympiad itself, is in no doubt that the whole experience of the next few months is going to be ‘amazing’. As she told the Guardian newspaper recently, she believes it will help shape the way people in Britain think, adding, ‘If we are lucky, we will change the way future Olympics see their cultural festivals.’ As the 2016 Olympics are scheduled for Rio de Janeiro that is a challenge the Brazilians are likely to relish.