Feedback from Chinese Olympic ceremony

July 27, 2012. Cafe Zen, Amsterdam. (Watching the early opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games on T.V, which was in fact the Beijing Games on replay)

How to compare the Occident and Orient in 2012? just look at the stylistic features and sources of inspiration for their respective Olympic openiong ceremony. One rooted in many thousand year old traditional arts and crafts that reflect the natural world, the other somewhat recent fictional characters from the world of make believe, television and film, the projection of recent popular mythology. Both have merits and points of criticism. 

FEEDBACK!

Ideographic dance, synchronized floor painting, atop huge scroll projection onto surface, trad. Oriental instruments strings lift canvas into air, camera flashes, red glow. Billions of body mind eye systems synchronize, remotely.

People emerge, like seeds from center flower in silver glowing suits red, blue, and little white lights glow in crowd. Tai Chi and Kung Fu in stone henge collection of monoliths, more light fantastic projections, nothing on seeper. Water projections, waterfalls but no water! imitation of school art square all within the scroll large multi colored Crayola type brushes in hands of children, surrounded by perhaps thousansands of Tai Chi, kung Fu practitioners. Amber lights, paint brushes dayglo in back sacks Large Trad. Chinese landscape painting rises into the air.

Space-man suspended on chords, now the space theme, some men in a pentagon stance atop a sphere, now earth and stars, fireworks shoot miles into the London night sky. Projected out of the sphere some Escheresque--concentric circles--10 tracks, opposite directions, giant whales swim around stadium pano while duo of singers, fireworks all over London and Beijing smudge a red hue. Faces projected around stadium.

Olympic flames enter stadium surrounded by nations flags blowing in wind, passing the fire a Chinese man lifts into the air, his torch almost going out, gasping for air, then he is lifted onto the panorama rim of the stadium, running in slow motion under spotlight, behind him the scroll unravels classic sport footage. He runs the whole stadium and lights up the fuse, massive flames flare up (I get the feeling of old Greek Olympics) more fireworks pop off up the river Thames for many miles, it seems.

Footage of Beijing Olympics?, oh yes. Anomalous incidents and crashes, falls, slips, balls in the face, arse in the face, great rallies, exceptional performances and near death and very dangerous looking images of sport, memorable due to great stupidity and great genius mixed.

I missed the rest of the ceremony, thankfully, my first impressions kept a positive note, i thought. --Steve fly