DIMITRIS PAPAIOANNOU / OPENING CEREMONY / 20 YEARS LATER

My Champions

My next move was to form a creative taskforce, a team of artist commandos. Back then an entire generation of stars was shining in the Indy art scene which I also derived from.

Giorgos Koumendakis would co-sign the concept and create the musical script. Tina Papanikolaou would coordinate the artistic creation with the collaboration of Yorghos Matskaris. Together with Kali Kavvatha, they would create a powerful shield of support around me.

Lili Pezanou, a beloved and tireless associate, would implement the scenographic concept.

Lina Nikolakopoulou, a beloved poet, would oversee the creative copy.

I ask Yorgos Lanthimos – who had not yet made even his first feature film – to join the team so that we can have an understanding of the broadcast. This ceremony is primarily a televised event.

I ask Dimitris Korres, genius engineer, to join us to determine the technical feasibility of my absurd dreams.

Eleftheria Deko would handle the lighting while seeking a colleague with Olympic and Broadcasting experience. They would design together.

Despite the fresh wound of our breakup, I ask Angeliki Stellatou to oversee all physical human movement.

Eleftheria questioned if this was a good choice, given that such a challenging endeavor would not permit risks of emotional entanglement. Tina told me: "No one else can deliver the quality of movement you seek." Tina was right.

Angeliki forms a team of dancers who -loyal to the method we had implemented in the two operas I had directed- would assist her in artistic research, finalize choreographies, under her guidance, conduct auditions, allocate volunteers according to their skills, teach them the choreographies, and perform with them on the big day.

Along with Lanthimos, and following Eva Stefani’s suggestion, we invite Athina Tsangari to document film-wise the entire three-year journey. Athina joins with enthusiasm and expansive tendencies. A year later, she directs the ceremony’s videos together with her inseparable associate, Matt Johnson.

Koumendakis brings the pianist Maria Metaxaki to the team – together, they will put out many fires.

Eleftheria brings us Bob Dickinson, who with great professionalism and tenderness, raises the level of lighting. Our ceremony used the most lighting fixtures in the history of entertainment up to that point. It broke the world record. The two of them would win an Emmy.

With the same artist, I would work 10 years later on the first European Games, which would bring him another Emmy. Recently, he sent me a message saying that he missed me and wished we could work together again; "Bobby wants another Emmy.", Tina said.

I had never met Sophia Kokosalaki, her star had just risen in the London fashion scene. I asked to meet her and when we did, she was skeptical. However, she agreed to join the creative team and take on the costumes. Midway through the process, she was struck with cancer for the first time, but continued to work throughout the chemotherapy. She never lost her sense of humor. I loved her. Before our ceremony aired, in an interview for French Vogue (if I remember correctly) when asked about me she said, "The first thing one should say about Dimitris is that he is a very good person." To this day, she’s the only one who has spoken of me in such a way. I hugged her for the last time at Sadler's Wells in London, when she came to watch The Great Tamer. Claustrophobic and agoraphobic, just like me, always seated at the edge, ready to leave. Shortly after, we learned of her death.

For the fireworks design, I avoided the Angelopoulos couple's suggestion for the American company and preferred Christophe Berthonneau, the French artistic director of Groupe F.

One must never underestimate the design of Fireworks: it’s the moment of ejaculation. The entire event is organized around a collective orgasm whose climax is fireworks.

We preferred the elegance of a French ejaculation.

That same American company set fire to Filothei with their fireworks at Gianna’s reception one day after the ceremony. I dodged a bullet. I’m convinced that one should ask for what one believes to be right even if it’s not always granted. One should always ask. You only regret the things you didn’t go for in life.

I ask Nikos Alexiou to define the sizes, proportions, and incisions of the sculptures of the Allegory. Nikos, who has passed, is one of the greatest artists of modern Greece. The National Museum of Contemporary Art should organize a massive tribute in his honor. But our country doesn’t give a shit about us, its contemporary artists. With Nikos, we were then in court over Medea, but the occasion was of a greater importance than our personal disputes. He creates a stunning model of the Stadium and the Calatrava roof, entirely made of bamboo. Today, it’s packed in one of the warehouses somewhere where everything sleeps in oblivion.

Athina Tsangari suggests to Socratis Socratous to photograph our monumental preparation. Socratis does it as a volunteer. He dedicates himself to the project obsessively, delves into everything, and captures all the beauty and sensual pathos in a unique way. It’s a pity that no one has yet published a collection of these stunning photographs. In this edition, I curated an album – as extensive as possible – for your enjoyment. Delve into it at the end of the article.

Jack the Ripper

We create the Stadium model and select the production company through an international bid.

This is how our adventure with Jack Morton begins. It was a very tough and confrontational partnership until the delivery of the project.

Fortunately, thanks to an ingenious move by Gianna, the artists' contracts are drafted directly with the Organizing Committee of "Athens 2004." The result: We do not report to the production company.

I don't want to bore you with these details, but it's important to understand this: what usually happens in these gigantic productions, where millions just fly around, is that a production company hires the artists, makes a flashy presentation, gets the job, and then cuts on quality execution, selects manufacturers taking kickbacks, and profits endlessly.

I experienced this identical scenario once again at the European Games.

When the artists are employees of such a company, they are powerless.

I had them dancing to my tune. Both times.

At the mention of my name, I’ m sure they will foam at the mouth. But their showreels, display my images first.

Friday the 13th

And the big day comes.

Scandal: Top athletes Kenteris and Thanou are caught doping!

Gianna calls early in the morning. I head to the Athens 2004 headquarters at the Hilton.

Kenteris, the ultimate runner star athlete, was the one supposed to light the flame. I had rehearsed with him exactly what to do and how to time the music. I had even asked him a favor –and with great tenderness, this “racehorse” with superhuman thighs had agreed– to run 100 meters with me and let me win! And that’s how I have a video where I outrun this legend.

We call Kaklamanakis.

We rehearse. Kaklamanakis is a sweet, beautiful man. "I'm terrible in running," he confides to me. But he runs.

The only compromise I have made is to dress the Pregnant Woman, despite the incredibly expensive and beautiful prosthetic we had designed allowing her to appear completely naked.

A gesture of respect to the Muslim countries participating in the Games despite that fact that Greek culture celebrated human nudity like no other.

We also covered the nipples of the Minoan Crocus Gatherers, whose fashion of the time wanted them topless. However, we left the Snake Goddess bare-breasted. Free the nipple!

I was also asked to cut the two falls of the Runner who ran through the chronological sequence of modern Olympic cities. This Runner stumbled and fell during the two World Wars – when the Olympics were cancelled.

I was asked to cut these falls. I didn't want to. Gianna, to her credit, supported me. "They create wars and ask us not to remember them! We will leave it as it is," she said.

So, I have rehearsed with Kaklamanakis, I have chosen the outfit Gianna will wear (by then, I had become her absolute confidant. Unfortunately, I neglected to supervise the shoes) and arrive at the Stadium.

My team in the "cockpit." Everyone with their headphones and microphones connected to the ear of every volunteer for instuctions and counting. Tina on the Centaur's stride and the volunteers' bow. Kali – a kindergarten teacher – on the child in the paper boat. Angeliki on Clepsydra. Everyone ready for takeoff. I take the microphone and whisper to all the volunteers "bon voyage”. We had made and handed out thousands of evil eye charms to feel united and protected at the face of this extreme exposure. The tension is immense and flows beneath a layer of icy calm.

I can't stand being inside.

I go out on the balcony above the crowd and decide to watch from there.

A cigarette in hand, legs hanging over the void, and a boy. I don't even know where he came from or what his name is but he had decided to experience that moment with me.

He was cute, so I let him be.

Everything begins.

The Tremendous Step

A Cycladic head, six stories tall, emerging from the center of a flooded Stadium, from the heart of a sea surrounded by 70,000 people, is an image that for me, would be enough of a gesture for an entire opening ceremony. The fact that I managed to create it is beyond my wildest dreams.

One morning, I woke up with this surreal, dreamlike image stuck in my head: a portrait of mankind, enormous, emerging, breaking into pieces, and forming islands – the Cyclades, the place where it was created and the place I first fell in love.

Now, It stood before me! Three-dimensional, transmitted to the retinas of 4 billion viewers! When things happen, one must remain calm, be present and fulfill one’s role. There is no room to rejoice or marvel at the fact that sometimes reality has the potential to grant you your dream. You only inhale and exhale.

“It was falling into the dream as I was coming out of the dream.”

I wanted to celebrate the awakening of human thought, the birth of human spirit, which occurred on Greek soil to benefit of all humanity.

With enigmatic but crystal-clear images that derived from the history of human portrayal in white marble. From prehistoric Cycladic idols to the tremendous step: the Kouros detaching himself from the stone that birthed him.

I first heard about this in an Art History lecture while studying at the School of Fine Arts, and remained engraved in my memory. Now it was time to become a work.

The Egyptians dared to project one foot of their statues forward. Nothing more. Their back was still built into the temple façades, like parked cars with their engines running, until the Greeks arrived. With a slight but thunderous shift of the axis, the Greeks moved the center of gravity between the two feet liberating the human form from its background forever.

Kouros stands upright ready for the next step. Man can now see his form from all sides and for the first time in History begins to write about how he feels.

Human personality begins to surface. Homer’s epic poetry gives way to lyric poetry. First among all humans a woman sings of her longing. Sappho.

And then the miracle: the figure rests on its one foot. It allows the axes of the pelvis and shoulders to tilt into slight diagonals, permitting one of two legs to relax. It can now reflect on its existence.

The first such statue in world history, the Kritios Boy is at the Acropolis Museum. It was named after its maker who was thus labelled as its father.

This adolescent body, "the first beautiful nude in art," according to Kenneth Clark, still retains the memory of the Kouros, but its absolute liberation from the stone is strikingly evident.

The new era has arrived; Democracy is born. Philosophy is born. The smile fades from the face. The smile of the Kouroi, identical to the Buddha’s and that of the East, disappears. The Kritios Boy is the world’s first citizen. Individual responsibility takes form; Athenian tragedy is born.

Like a Big Bang in mankind’s journey towards self-discovery, the sculptures explode revealing one another. Fragments hover, become celestial bodies traveling through the cubic space of the Stadium and land in the water creating the landscape of the Cyclades.

Land forms ideas. Ideas form the land. Two contrasting truths overllayed.

They were named "Cyclades" because they form a circle around the sacred island of Delos, the birthplace of Apollo, God of Light.

I had imagined the opening ceremony as Apollonian (harmony, clarity, order) and the closing ceremony as Dionysean (emotion, ecstasy, chaos). Greek identity balances on this chord-tense polarity.

The transition from Mythos (Mythology) to Logos (Reason). It all begins with a Centaur walking on water and ends with a man balancing on a hovering, rotating cube. The cube rotates on two axes, like the Earth around the Sun and around itself. Light and self-knowledge. To balance, you sometimes have to move forward and sometimes step back. The man of Myth hands over the baton to the man of Reason.

The Centaur, just before exiting, stands to looks back biding farewell to the Man on the cube. This stance, the look back, the final gesture of farewell is something omnipresent in my work evident to someone who pays attention to such subtle details. This is the way the boy bids farewell to its Great Tamer, and this is how life itself also bids him farewell in the form of the Goddess of Fertility.

It was Lina who brought me Seferis’ verses a few months back. They were exactly the introduction we needed before entering the dream:

Dissection

In the formation of this proposal, the distillation of these ideas into images and actions, our ceremony was based on four axes.

First Axis: Art.

An art centered ceremony. That is our manifesto. The art of a land is its history. No one mentioned it; I wonder how many noticed. What the world saw were exclusively images created by artists who through the ages have lived in the same land as us. Brought to life by their contemporary counterparts.

Second Axis: Demeanor.

In our celebration no one externalizes joy. We are all concentrated, fully aware that what we’re referring to is bigger than us. Our celebration is full of sensuality and dignity, and its joy is whispered as if in a dream. Every face serious, but deeply moved. People will run, parade, fall. They will move gently in the harmony set in motion. Objects and bodies will be choreographed as one. Everything will unfold before our eyes with modesty and boldness. The show’s grandiosity doesn’t rule out intimacy, celebration does not negate dignity, joy is not necessarily externalized, and awareness of history doesn’t mean passive submission. I used monumental minimalism. With unprecedented use of technology, I created a surrealistic dream that was realized on a large scale without ever losing the feeling of human measure.

That is the reason Melissanidis’ burst of joy seemed out of place, but bless him. It was his moment and he had earned it with lots of talent and sweat.

Third Axis: Sensuality.

An erotic, electric current runs through everything. We want seduction. We want to connect to the viewers soul in a subconscious way. The Stadium resembles a giant vagina, the water embraces everything in its femininity. The male power of the fire fertilizes the water. The phallic cauldron is raised as soon as it’s lit. The couple kiss on the mouth. The mind-blowing Clepsydra reveals the beauty of its children, and everyone: the Centaur, Eros, the Pregnant Woman, the Runner, the Man on the Cube, unconscious of their radiance steal everyone’s heart.

Yearning infuses everything: from the interaction of the first two men and their erotic synchronization that shoots fiery semen, to the Snake Goddess. All dripping sensuality leading to the final orgasm of the fireworks.

Fourth Axis: Secret Geometry.

The space of the Stadium will be mapped in such way so that the final route of the athlete who lights the flame will seem like a solution, with the final trajectory that makes the climax irreversible.

This electric tension will be activated with the placement of the two percussionists on this axis. Everything will then emerge from the center and spread to the periphery. Subsequently, the oval will be encircled and in a spiral movement the space will fill up completely. Then it will be divided in half reviving this initial axis defined by the percussionists for the last torchbearer to run across. This final straight line will connect Earth and Sky through Fire.

We will place our bets on the power of architecture. We will create a spatial adventure that will subconsciously lead to euphoria at the ceremony’s climax, which is the lighting of the Olympic Flame.

Back to the Stadium

When everything ended, I was numb. To avoid burning out I had suppressed my emotions. No joy, no relief. A zombie state.

Zombie-like I headed downstairs to be congratulated by the officials, and zombie-like I dragged myself to the press conference to faintly mutter: "We tried to talk about love."

I still hadn't realized what had happened. Later, we briefly stopped by the club Envy where the volunteers had thrown a party. Then, hypoglycemia, a miserable crêpe in Exarchia Square and home to sleep, alone.

The Morning After

I woke up and went out.

Every frontpage on all the city’s kiosks was covered with the images I had created. My Olympic comic had taken over an entire city.

Laurie Anderson called me, moved and proud – I felt deeply happy.

That afternoon, I was invited to appear on the news with Nikos Hatzinikolaou (Popular TV anchorman). He kept me waiting for an entire hour because the panel was ablaze with the Kenteris-Thanou doping scandal. When I was finally on -for half a second- he barely gave me time to talk but found the chance however, to criticize: “The ceremony had a dip (exact expression in Greek is “had a belly”.) “You mean the belly of the Pregnant Woman.”, I replied.

Steven Spielberg and Zhang Yimou agreed that the Greek opening was the best ever, Romeo Castellucci couldn't comprehend how I managed to achieve something like that but Nikos Hatzinikolaou, at that moment on the news, one day after the ceremony, in the few seconds we discussed, felt it appropriate, had the human need to publicly state that, in his opinion the show dragged on a bit.

And here is, a cartoon by KYR. I grew up with his strips and felt honored to be poked at by his pen in such a sweet and witty manner.