Performing the Republic: contesting meaning at the 2024 Olympic Opening Ceremony

This paper examines the ways in which nationalism and the narratives of the nation were constructed in the Olympic opening ceremonies in Beijing 2008 and London 2012. The ritual of the opening ceremony represents a concentration of features, qualities and messages that combine the local and global, the culturally specific and universal, in a complex production. Using textual analysis of the telecast of the above two opening ceremonies, the study found that the Beijing 2008 opening ceremony used a grand narrative of progress, emphasising the unified identity of Chineseness, while privileging the official narrative of the nation and one collective identity. In contrast, the London 2012 opening ceremony highlighted the fragmented but diversified identity of Britishness, transpiring social inclusivity, cultural hybridity and multiculturalism. This may be related to the rise of different type of nationalism in the context of increasing globalisation. The Beijing opening ceremony represented the Sinocentric Chinese new nationalism, whereas the London 2012 counterpart, up to a point, highlighted civic‐based multicultural nationalism.

This article argues that a logic model is an effective analytical tool to examine the opening ceremony of the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics as an exercise in soft power. Specifically, it uses a logic model as a guide to emphasize how the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics provided a structure to share values and culture with the intention to influence. Although this is not an evaluative inquiry, the evaluative framework lends itself to identifying the resources required for the creation of the opening ceremony and the formal presentation. For instance, a review of interurban competition (competition between cities or regions that attract economic activities), management and boycotts as inputs of the Los Angeles Games reveal the presentation of American culture and values during the Olympic opening ceremony. The purpose of this article is to implement a logic model as means for understanding the cultural programming of the Olympics by first identifying the unique inputs for the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics and analysing the visual presentation of the opening ceremony.

This essay examines the polarizing politics of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. I analyse the function of soft-power diplomacy in the design of the opening ceremony in relation to the international controversy around these games over the repression of civil and human rights. The Sochi Olympics became a lightning rod inciting pro-Western democratic protests against and Russian neo-national support for President Vladimir V. Putin's cultural reform programme. I argue that the Sochi stage was the opening scene of a much larger cultural propaganda campaign reflecting the government's move to boost a conservative world view. Sochi's spectacle mediated a reform strategy designed to reinvent Russian identity and restore Russia's global status. For contrast, I look back to the opening ceremony of the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics and its vision of Soviet society in order to highlight the changing contexts in which soft power underscores broader objectives in geocultural politics.

Just as they are to the events themselves, the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics have become central to academic research on the Games and their political, social, and cultural roles. And so the recent string of Olympic Games held in East Asia – two of them under the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic – offer the opportunity to think both about region-specific meanings associated with these highly scripted affairs and about the ways they might destabilize broader judgments about the Olympics and their implications. This paper introduces the contributions to this special volume on the Opening Ceremonies at Asia’s recent Olympic Games, aiming to draw attention not only to the specific contributions of each paper but also to the themes that they collectively engage.

This study assessed the impact of the artistic program of the Winter Olympics opening ceremony event on international spectators’ national image branding of the host country and their intention to visit the host nation. We surveyed a total of 600 international spectators of the South Korea PyeongChang Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony (150 Filipino, 150 Americans, 150 British, and 150 South Africans; 50% female) on their perceptions of quality of the opening ceremony, national image branding, and their intention to visit the host country. Results from hierarchical analysis indicated that the quality of the artistic program of the PyeongChang Winter Olympics opening ceremony (content of expression, form of expression, and narrative of nation) predicted perceptions of host country national image and behavioural intentions to visit. From these findings, we conclude that the artistic program of the opening ceremony of an Olympic event is a valuable opportunity to help international spectators to better understand the host country culture, and for influencing their tourism intentions.

If director Danny Boyle's intention at the Olympic opening ceremony was to provide a snapshot of Britain today, he succeeded. It was an inspired feast of energy, colour and vibrancy - as well as being great fun.

<p>Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyse the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony with the goal of making a nuanced contribution to the discussion of online participation and engagement afforded by social media.</p> <p>Design/methodology/approach</p> <p>This paper applies a qualitative approach of sequential video analysis to the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony interpretive segment.</p> <p>Findings: Despite the Olympics being a “networked media sport” where countries compete against each another in various sporting events, the paper argues that the overarching narrative of the London 2012 opening ceremony is one that breaks down traditional barriers, while simultaneously situating the individual at the centre of “networked spectatorship”.</p> <p>Originality/value: Beyond merely watching media events, the paper proposes the term, “networked spectators” to identify how people participate in the content creation, social media moderation, and conversation using social media. Networked spectatorship moves away from the binary of active and passive participation, and rather reflects on the multiple ways people can engage in media events, which specifically includes social media monitoring/moderation as a form of participation.</p>

Colluding with the Enemy? Nationalism and Depictions of “Aboriginality” in Canadian Olympic Moments Jennifer Adese (bio) After the Indians had their moment in the spotlight, they danced back into history, making way for miners, cowboys and settlers of all races to do-se-do together (as if that ever happened in that place and time). Only the Indians were missing from the hoedown in Salt Lake. But these are just symbols, you say? Well, yeah. Mega-bucks worth of symbols. Symbology that reaches millions of people around the world and leaves a lasting impression in the place of reality. Suzan Shown Harjo, “Indians in the Olympics Ceremony? Postcard from the Past” As a fair-skinned âpihtawikosis-âniskwéw (Cree-Métis woman), I am one of many Indigenous peoples who have been, as Emma Larocque writes, “hounded and haunted by White North America’s image machine.”1 I became interested in researching Indigenous involvement in the Olympics after one of my cousins forwarded to me in September 2009 the application to attend the Indigenous Youth Gathering (iyg) to be held from January 30 to February 14, 2010. The Vancouver 2010 Olympics were slated to start on February 12 and run until February 28; since the iyg was to end just a couple of days after the opening of the games, it was clear that applicants were being tapped to play some role in the opening of the games. Given the involvement of Indigenous peoples in previous Olympic opening and closing ceremonies (in 1976 and 1988), it was not a stretch to assume we would play a role in Vancouver’s opening ceremony. This was made clearer by the fact that the application form requests [End Page 479] that we include two full-length color photographs of ourselves wearing traditional clothing, clothing that we would be expected to bring with us to the gathering. The application encourages youth to, “where applicable,” incorporate accessories such as roaches/masks, hair ornaments, face or body paint, earrings/pendants, arm or leg bracelets or bands, skins/furs/bark, footwear, and instruments or drums and rattles. The application asks, however, that applicants “not wear non-traditional clothing” (a.k.a. “contemporary” clothing) in the photos.2 This was the first gathering application, out of the many that I’d seen, that required a picture to be included in the application. Having my moccasins, my Métis sash, and my dad’s moosehide jacket, I wasn’t sure that even with all this and my “Homeland Security: Fighting Terrorism Since 1492” T-shirt I’d be “Aboriginal enough” to be selected, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to find out—or that I wanted anyone affiliated with the Olympic organizing committee to decide whether or not I was. This experience has inspired me to question more deeply the nature of Indigenous involvement in the 2010 Vancouver Olympic opening ceremony. Indigenous peoples have been involved in each of the Canadian-hosted Olympics (to varying degrees), and, given my encounter with the 2010 iyg application form, I came to question the nature of organizational committees’ motives with regard to Indigenous performance in ceremonies. Why are we so popular? The 1976 Montréal Summer Olympic closing ceremony, the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympic opening ceremony, and the 2010 Winter Olympic opening ceremony in Vancouver each placed Indigenous peoples at the heart of its expressions of regional, provincial, and Canadian national identity in one form or another. Why is it that organizing committees view Indigenous peoples as central to Olympic ceremonies and as so seemingly central to the narratives of national identity produced during them? What is Canada trying to say about itself by insisting on Indigenous presence within the Olympic ceremonies when in so many other spaces in Canadian society we are purposefully invisibilized? I argue that while earlier national narratives alluded to the racial superiority of “white” Canadians and their hand in subjugating/civilizing Indigenous populations, in recent decades it has become far less fashionable to insinuate such things. Canada has thus consistently drawn on the multiculturalist rhetoric (of equality) as a framework for narrating Canadian-Indigenous relations. The amplified international attention brought by the Olympics has [End...

<p>Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyse the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony with the goal of making a nuanced contribution to the discussion of online participation and engagement afforded by social media.</p> <p>Design/methodology/approach</p> <p>This paper applies a qualitative approach of sequential video analysis to the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony interpretive segment.</p> <p>Findings: Despite the Olympics being a “networked media sport” where countries compete against each another in various sporting events, the paper argues that the overarching narrative of the London 2012 opening ceremony is one that breaks down traditional barriers, while simultaneously situating the individual at the centre of “networked spectatorship”.</p> <p>Originality/value: Beyond merely watching media events, the paper proposes the term, “networked spectators” to identify how people participate in the content creation, social media moderation, and conversation using social media. Networked spectatorship moves away from the binary of active and passive participation, and rather reflects on the multiple ways people can engage in media events, which specifically includes social media monitoring/moderation as a form of participation.</p>

The 2012 Olympic Games was an event watched on television by billions of viewers worldwide. In the United States, approximately 40 million people viewed a tape-delayed opening ceremony of the games on the NBC network. With such a high viewership, NBC was in a position of power to influence and educate their audience on the various countries across the globe who participated in the Olympic Games and opening ceremony. Drawing on Gregory's notion of a ‘geographic imagination’, we suggest NBC editors put their version of the world on display to the American audience, thus influencing the way in which American viewers may understand the world. In this paper, we have constructed a map to provide a visual representation of NBC's geographic imagination. We find this map, based on total screen time the countries received during the ‘Parade of Nations’ segment of the opening ceremony, to suggest a unique geographic imagination worthy of further study because of its potential wide influence.

Reviewed by: Το πρόσφατο μέλλον: Η κλασική αρχαιότητα ως βιοπολιτικό εργαλείο (Δημήτρης Πλάντζος) [Recent futures: Classical antiquity as biopolitical tool] by Dimitris Plantzos Despina Lalaki (bio) Dimitris Plantzos (Δημήτρης Πλάντζος), Το πρόσφατο μέλλον: Η κλασική αρχαιότητα ως βιοπολιτικό εργαλείο [Recent futures: Classical antiquity as biopolitical tool]. Athens: Nefeli. 2016. Pp. 272. 40 illustrations. Paper €17.90. In 2008, when the economic crisis broke out in Greece as a result of the wider economic and fiscal crisis in the United States and the greater part of Europe, a fierce debate over who was to blame erupted within the Greek public sphere and the international media. Did the fault lie with the economic and political elites of the country, who over the decades failed to reform the economy while also engaging in rampant corruption? Was it the ancien system of clientelism that bound the government and the people into a relationship of increasing codependence and led to the creation of a hydrocephalus, dysfunctional state? Or did responsibility lie with the leadership of the European Union, with international financial organizations, such as the IMF and the World Bank, and with the world’s investment banking system? After the lengthy discussions and biting debates, and once the dust kicked up by thousands of protesters and the [End Page 416] smoke and teargas in the streets of Athens settled, the question “why Greece?” may still haunt our imagination for some time to come. Το πρόσφατο μέλλον: Η κλασική αρχαιότητα ως βιοπολιτικό εργαλείο (Recent futures: Classical antiquity as biopolitical tool) is certainly not a book about the economic crisis, yet it attempts to delineate the crisis’s cultural history, as Dimitris Plantzos suggests in his introduction (15). The book outlines narratives about violence, civil society, the right to Europe, and the ways these intersect with understandings of the past as both a mechanism to control the present and a disciplining apparatus to regulate public sentiment. Western modernity’s political and cultural imaginary is inextricably tied to ancient Greek civilization, while Modern Greece owes its existence precisely to this dialectic between the West’s imaginary and Greek classical heritage. Before it was even politically constituted as a nation-state, Modern Greece had been grounded on a series of imaginary significations directly tied to antiquity. The literature on the subject is quite rich. Rarer are the studies that bring questions of Hellenism into the present in order to explore its effects and the ways it informs our aesthetic, moral, political, and social life today. Hellenism in this sense has a dialectic relationship between Western and Greek modernity and the classical past. Plantzos’s book is a very welcome contribution, especially as it addresses a wider readership beyond academia. Το πρόσφατο μέλλον is largely based on some of the author’s most thought-provoking articles and studies available until now only in English. Following a roughly chronological order, the book covers the decade between 2004 and 2014. It starts with the opening ceremony of the Olympics in 2004 and interprets the event as both a coming-of-age ritual for the Modern Greek state and as a farewell to the traumatic twentieth century. It ends with the events surrounding the rediscovery of the monumental Amphipolis Tomb. The book moves gradually from a discussion of biopolitics to an analysis of thanatopolitics—by now the central agenda of the West, according to Giorgio Agamben (1998)—and an analysis of the European politics of the crisis. All four chapters critically approach rituals and public performances of local, national, or international appeal that have been orchestrated either by the Greek state itself or by the general public. Habituated to archaeolatry and the worship of ancestors (προγονολατρία), these rituals reproduce familiar narratives about the nation, patriarchy, heterosexuality, and racial purity while often changing and recolonizing them in the process. The first chapter analyzes in depth a series of heterotopian technologies—the Olympics opening ceremony, campaigns by the Greek National Tourism Organization (Εθνικός Οργανισμός Τουρισμού, EOT), Greek filmography, vernacular architecture—and offers a [End Page 417] genealogy of the scientific, literary, and artistic grounding of Hellenism. Historians, folklorists, archaeologists, poets, and artists at large took it upon themselves to Hellenize Greek history or recover the singular essence of Hellenic art. The internalization of the relationship with ancient Greece would be central in this process of the constitution of the national subject and archaeology, to which Plantzos, a classical archaeologist himself, pays particular attention...

If director Danny Boyle’s intention at the Olympic opening ceremony was to provide a snapshot of Britain today, he succeeded. It was an inspired feast of energy, colour and vibrancy – as well as being great fun.

This essay focuses on the coverage of the past seven Olympic Opening Ceremonies (1984–2008) through the lens of one national broadcaster: China Central Television (CCTV), which has been the sole Olympic TV rights holder within the Chinese mainland during this period. Through textual analysis of CCTV's live broadcast narrative, I hope to first shed light on how the concept of liminality may be used to analyze the coverage of a highly ritualized sports event. Second, I look for changes in the media's ritual practices and ritual language across these years and search for possible explanations.

This study adopts research methods such as literature review and interview to analyze the performance of the opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. The study focuses on the Olympic concept, duration, national culture, AI use, optical application, stage design, fireworks performance, venue selection, and the relationship with technological development. give the result as follows1. Simplicity, beauty, modernity. Showcasing three themes, namely China's pursuit and longing for world peace, "Faster, Higher, Stronger, and more united", and "Together towards the future".2. The blessing of technology is more important than any previous Olympic opening ceremony performance. Human screen dance technology, holographic projection technology, AI technology empowerment, 3D lighting stage technology, double-sided screen technology, laser engraving technology, and irregular screen technology will be the main means of empowering the Olympic opening ceremony performance.3.The color scheme of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics is mainly cold, which blends harmoniously with the emphasis on ice and snow in the Winter Olympics.4.The development and utilization of ethnic elements in the opening ceremony performance of this Winter Olympics are reasonable and appropriate, mainly including Chinese paintings, Chinese totems, Chinese stories, Chinese proverbs, Chinese characters, Chinese clothing, etc.5.The selection of the performance venue for the opening ceremony at the National Stadium of China seems somewhat conservative.6.Reduced the fixed construction stage and replaced it with a variable and mobile stage. Technological stage. The use of LED screens makes the performance more diverse.7.The ignition ceremony highlights the ice and snow of the Winter Olympics, showcases the subtle fire in a low-key manner, highlights the theme, and also embodies the concept of low-carbon environmental protection8.The opening ceremony performance of this Winter Olympics focuses more on sports performances, downplaying artistic performances and highlighting sports characteristics. Performed by ordinary citizens, primary, secondary, and high school students, as well as young people from all over the world, emphasizing the need for everyone to come together.

Conventionally, partial redundancy is applied at frail or crucial parts in most control system. As for the significant occasion of the Olympics Opening and Closing Ceremony, any fault of the control system may result in immeasurable losses. In this paper, we focus on redundancy policies and introduce the realizing of two different redundancy systems: the basic whole redundancy system, and the Hetero-type whole redundancy system, viz. two different control kernels (the PLC and its corresponding software and network) used in the same system. These two redundancy control systems are implemented at examination place and the National Stadium individually. These control systems set a successful example of the redundancy system implemented in mechanical control system at important occasions. By analyzing and comparing the reliability of the two redundancy systems, we get the results that the Hetero-type whole redundancy system has higher reliability than the basic whole redundancy system.