It’s Quite a Balancing Act

Sting relaxed in his hotel room just before heading out Friday to shuttle through security and brave the frigid winter night, before a crowd of more than 55,000 people, to sing--accompanied by cellist Yo-Yo Ma--a song chosen as a reflection of the times: “Fragile.”

Unprompted, Sting said he was proud to be honored with this duty, “celebrating athleticism and human achievement and grace.”

This was precisely the chord organizers of Friday night’s opening ceremony hoped to strike during the more than two years of planning. “What we are so excited about is to bring heart and meaning to the ceremonies,” Scott Givens, the Salt Lake Organizing Committee’s creative director, said before the show.

Organizers had to strike a delicate balance in producing the ceremony, which mixed history and culture, featured ice skaters and horses, dove-like kites and fireworks--and a character called the “child of light,” to deliver the theme of these Games that anyone can be an inspiration.

Also at issue were a slew of sensitive artistic, cultural and historical elements: How best, for instance, to depict Utah for the nation, the American West to the world?

There also were parochial but powerful American interests and sentiments to consider, particularly in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, which led to the unprecedented security surrounding the ceremony and the Games. Friday night the torn and tattered U.S. flag recovered from the rubble of the World Trade Center site was carried into Rice-Eccles Stadium as the “Star-Spangled Banner” rang out.

But there was always the reminder that this was an event designed to go beyond the nation, to the world.

All these factors needed to meld together in the climax of the program, the lighting of the caldron--done as a team by the 1980 U.S. men’s hockey team. Unlike lightings at previous Games, traditionally performed by a solo athlete, Friday night’s was the work of a team of Americans--showing the world, in the minds of organizers, the best of America.

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The opening ceremony of an Olympics, Winter or Summer, typically serves as one of the defining events of a Games. It is watched worldwide by a TV audience in the billions.

Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Sports, the U.S. broadcaster of the Olympics from 2000 through 2008, observed in an interview last month that the ceremony is by far the “most important event” of the Games for most of the 2,500 athletes in Salt Lake City--because they have virtually no chance of winning a medal.

“For 90% of them, that is their moment,” he said. “You see it, their exuberance.”

But the appeal goes well beyond that, Ebersol explained: “It gives you the impression, even for a brief moment, that we can all get along.”

John MacAloon, a University of Chicago anthropology professor who is an Olympic historian and expert on Olympic protocol, said that’s in large part because the ceremony goes beyond bringing together of athletes from around the world.

In attendance Friday night was the most powerful man in the world, President George W. Bush--sharing the moment with ordinary folks from Utah and elsewhere, a representation of “the common cause of both well-to-do people and famous people and ordinary people in making this festival happen,” according to MacAloon.

The ceremony also offers powerful symbolism in which people around the world invest their hopes and dreams, he said. The five interlocking Olympic rings are one of the world’s most recognizable symbols.

And, MacAloon said, the ceremony also provides “a kind of secular taking-stock of how things are in the world today.”

Salt Lake Organizing Committee President Mitt Romney said it was important to have “ceremonies to touch people’s hearts and inspire people, and I did not want another Hollywood minute.”

Nearly 60 production companies vied for the business. In September 1999, Romney chose Don Mischer, who had produced the widely acclaimed ceremonies at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta--where Muhammad Ali lit the caldron. Mischer’s extensive honors include more than a dozen Emmy awards.

Mischer, the executive producer, estimated he could do the ceremony for about $25 million to $30 million, comparatively reasonable. He would bring in an experienced crew, among them artistic director Kenny Ortega, choreographer for some of music’s biggest names (Madonna, Michael Jackson, Elton John) and musical director Mark Watters; both had worked with Mischer in 1996, as had producer David Goldberg, Mischer’s chief lieutenant.

Romney had another goal, to tell a story about Utah and the West--and avoid stereotypical references while doing it.

Mischer, according to anthropology professor MacAloon, signed up for “by far the hardest job in any Olympic Games.”

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In deciding how to portray Utah and the West, Mischer drew on the experience he had gained six years ago in Atlanta, when he was asked to depict the American South.

“Nothing,” he said, “focuses a city’s or a state’s or a country’s insecurity about itself more than hosting the Olympic Games.”

There’s no point in undertaking a sweeping historical examination, he said. Nor is there time.

The ceremony runs about three hours--a big chunk of which is devoted to the parade of nations, about an hour Friday night--and so, “It’s not like you can teach history or tell a complicated story. It really is about music and dancing and spectacle and hopefully you have an emotional moment every now and then.”

Two key creative decisions were reached fairly early on. One, it was decided to make extensive use of ice as a platform for the show--far more than in prior Winter Games ceremonies. Two, as Romney said, “And then it became that we had segments that were connected by a child of light, by the pervasive theme of a light within, [representing] people who had inspired.”

These decisions drove a good deal of what would come over the next few months.

For instance, the main rink was built big, 200 feet by 130 feet, and a “starfield”--points of lights that could evoke an image of a wide-open nighttime western sky--was buried into it as it was constructed last November underneath a two-inch layer of ice.

Also, Sarah Kawahara, one of the world’s best figure skating choreographers--Michelle Kwan had asked her last summer to design the long program Kwan will perform here--came aboard. Kristi Yamaguchi, the gold-medal winner in the 1992 Albertville Games, was recruited to star in one of the skating numbers.

More than just a starfield would be needed, though, to weave a story about Utah and the West.

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Before there were people, there was the land and there were animals.

Then came the first people, the native Americans.

Then came the white settlers.

There, in substance, was the history lesson.

To help tell the story of the land, Michael Curry, who designed the imaginative costumes in the hit play “The Lion King,” was hired. He did the distinctive deer, rattlesnake and horse props, as well as an oversize buffalo that projected images of a herd on the move--onto the side of the animal. The technology was simple: a battery-operated light and buffalo-shaped cutouts.

Five tribes call Utah home: Ute, Goshute, Shoshone, Paiute and Navajo-Dine. Last summer, Mischer and key aides spent several days driving around the state, visiting each of the tribal councils.

“The concept was, we would preserve their individual tribal identity when they came into the stadium. We said, you can come in as Goshute. You can come in as Shoshone. You can come in as Paiute. But by the time we finish we want you all to be together.

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Friday night, ceremonial tribal leaders of each of the five nations delivered a blessing upon the athletes of the world; about 2,500 are here for the Games. Speaking in his native language, Tommy Pacheco of the Shoshone nation said, “We are here today as brothers, sisters and friends. Our creator will watch over us. This is good.”

The native American segment also offered musical director Watters the chance to do something he’d first thought of six years ago in Atlanta but didn’t do then--let the audience play music, believed to be a first in the Olympic ceremonies. Plastic flutes were passed out to each member of the audience Friday night, in five different colors, one for each native American tribe, and the different colored flutes played while each of the tribes entered.

When all five flutes were sounded together, they produced a harmonic chord that filled the stadium--just as, on a much smaller scale, the sound had enveloped organizers’ work tent when they first tried the flutes in late November. A “warm and engulfing thing,” Mischer said.

The segment about the settlers followed: “In waves they came by the thousands. Spanish missionaries, English and Canadian trappers, Mexicans, Chinese, German and Irish miners and Mormon pioneers.”

Within the show’s organizers, the settler segment occasioned much debate and uncertainty.

Ortega, the artistic director, said he initially was strongly against such a segment. He thought it would be trite. But he said he was convinced--or, more precisely, willingly “surrendered.”

Mischer said beforehand, “I don’t know how people are going to respond to the Western thing. It’s very hard to satisfy everyone.... “The history of the state--the native Americans and the pioneers did not get along.

“There were battles and massacres and all that. Again, you’re not teaching history. You’re reflecting elements of the culture that exist today.”

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By Sept. 11, the blueprint for the show was well in place.

After the attacks, Mischer said, “We asked, to what extent do we change the content?

“By and large, we felt like the artistic segments we had planned were still the right thing to do.... To become super-patriotic was probably the wrong thing to do.”

That said, “It was agonizing for us.”

Mischer said he was mindful of his experience at the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games, where he watched the opening ceremony as a fan and was enthralled. Later, after becoming involved with the Olympics, he met an IOC member who believed that show was “second only to Hitler’s in 1936 in terms of nationalism.”

But at a dress rehearsal Wednesday night, after listening to the Robert Shaw version of the national anthem that starts alone and builds to a sweeping crescendo, Mischer stopped to reflect.

“Other nations understate their national anthem,” Mischer said. “Americans do not understate their national anthem. It’s part of our culture to do it big, with bravado.”

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It’s also part of our culture to bring out big stars for oversized events. The show Friday featured Robbie Robertson, the Dixie Chicks and LeAnn Rimes.

“Fragile,” the song Sting wrote in the 1980s, has since Sept. 11 achieved a renewed popularity.

“It’s a song about violence and the fragility of life in the face of terrorism, guns and bullets,” Sting said. “We are fragile beings.”

Givens, the creative director of SLOC, said the title said it all: “That’s where we think we are with peace in the world right now.”

The spot with Sting and Yo-Yo Ma also illustrated dramatically the challenge facing organizers whose main goal, above all, was to give no offense.

Olympic protocol calls for the release of doves. But animal-rights activists would be sure to protest bitterly if real doves were used at night, because the birds most likely wouldn’t be able to find their way back to accustomed shelter, Givens said.

The spot also underscored the challenges of producing live music outside, in winter, at night.

Ma, for instance, was hardly about to take his $5-million cello outside.

So organizers made extensive use of recorded tracks.

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Early Friday morning, the wind howled and broke four camera cranes. One “snapped like a toothpick,” Mischer said.

Crews worked all day to rebuild the other three.

Meantime, the wind also ripped apart three balloons that had been set to rise at the close of the ceremony. “It felt like a tornado,” Mischer said. The wind also threatened a stunt at the end of the program, in which organizers set the ice on fire--a trick they had rehearsed perhaps 30 times.

But if some things inevitably went wrong as the ceremony got underway, much went right. The ice trick worked just fine.

An eagle flew on command around the stadium, much to the delight of President Bush. A horse that had balked at walking on ice carried out the Paiute leader, and when the World Trade Center flag was held aloft, the moment was marked by absolute silence.

As the parade of nations began, the mood shift was palpable. Even the Mormon Tabernacle Choir joined in when the stadium audience broke into the wave.

For a couple hours, it was even possible to forget one was living in a 21st-century equivalent of an armed camp.

At the end of the program, television producer-director George Schlatter walked in to the control booth and bellowed his approval: “Go top that, somebody!”

As far as Goldberg is concerned, somebody did. As he was accompanying President Bush out of the stadium, he said the president turned to him and said: “A great day, really well done.”