Olympic performance

They’ve been training for years, often in the pre-dawn dim and sometimes after dark. Practice makes perfect, so the cliché goes. The Olympics is a tough and unforgiving business - and you don’t have to be an athlete to feel the pressure.

Thousands of musicians, dancers, singers, lighting technicians, sound engineers and directors will be involved in the London 2012 Opening Ceremony. And none of them wants to make a mistake in front of a predicted global TV audience of more than a billion people.

In sporting terms, their event is somewhat of a marathon.

“The country that hosts the Olympics knows six years in advance,” celebrated Australian Stage Manager - and Victorian College of the Arts lecturer - Annie Reid says.

“So for your opening ceremony, you’d be choosing your creative team many years in advance even as part of your Olympic bid presentation.”

That task for the London Games has fallen to Oscar award winning filmmaker, Danny Boyle.

The Slumdog Millionaire director’s full budget is reported to be roughly £27 million ($A43m).

The Queen and Prince Philip will attend the ceremony, which will explore the theme of ‘The Isles of Wonder’.

Mr Boyle has already assured an austerity weary British public not to expect the extravagances of past ceremonies.

“It’s not going to be like Beijing in terms of overwhelming scale,” he told reporters in London in 2010.

Most Olympics watchers, however, are still anticipating the big ticket musical acts, mass dance routines, extravagant costumes and coordinated lighting shows that have come to define modern Olympic ceremonies.

“You can have somebody just lifting an arm up and down, up and down. And when it’s one person doing that it’s fairly boring,” says Annie Reid - who’s spent decades working on large theatrical events, including for Opera Australia, the annual Melbourne Cup street parade, and AFL grand final pre-match entertainment.

“But when it’s 1500 kids in a sparkly sleeve it looks spectacular!”

Reid says small groups of opening ceremony performers will have been rehearsing separately across the UK for many months.

“For a big event like that, that’s how you’d do it. And then closer to the event you would have bigger and bigger rehearsals in a larger space, like a showgrounds pavilion,” she says.

Indigenous opera singer Deborah Cheetham, who heads the Victorian College of the Arts Wilin Centre for Indigenous Arts and Cultural Development, composed and sang the welcome to country for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games opening ceremony.

A number of her students also performed at the event, and Ms Cheetham recalls their “many, many weeks” of rehearsals.

“They were taken out to secret locations where they would rehearse in the evenings.”

“Their parents would bring them to a central location known as a hub and then they would be bussed to a rehearsal venue.”

And not until a few weeks before the opening ceremony would most performers set foot inside the arena space.

“There are normally three main rehearsals and two dress rehearsals in the venue. So, yes, it is really difficult to keep those sorts of events secret. Generally people enter into the spirit of the occasion and seem to live up to the agreement they have made.”

Ms Cheetham fondly remembers singing in front of a capacity crowd at the 2000 opening ceremony.

“When you’re performing live to 110,000 people in a stadium, that is quite surreal. I felt incredibly honoured to be involved, and to also sing the welcome to country.

“In 2000, the concept of welcome to country was quite new to non-indigenous Australian’s and I think our welcome to country (and Steven Page’s incredible performance segment) set the benchmark.”

For better or for worse, politics and sport are firmly entwined.

The Olympics have the ability to shine a light on race discrimination or draw attention to international conflict, and can so often provide moments where the actions of athletes speak louder than a thousand politicians’ words.

The images of African American athletes making the ‘Black Power’ salute on the podium at the 1968 Games lingers in the public consciousness, while Adolf Hitler’s conduct at the 1930 Berlin Games troubled even his staunchest Western apologists and the US boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics brought the Cold War into sharp focus.

The Opening Ceremony can provide a similar platform for engagement.

In few other events do Israeli and Iranian athletes – drawn together through their nations’ common initial – march so closely, in the one direction, while listening to the same music and being cheered by the one crowd.

“It’s what the Olympics are really all about,” says Ms Reid.

“And that’s what entertainment is about as well. You go to the theatre - no matter how small - to be and have yourself in another place and time and forget about what your problems are.”

Deborah Cheetham agrees.

“I believe that music has the power to unite people in a much more powerful way than sport. Ultimately in sport someone has to win and someone has to lose.

“This is why the arts and cultural programs are so important to the Olympics festival: as we celebrate the efforts of our elite athletes we can also unite to join in the celebration of the human spirit through the arts.”