On the morning after the opening ceremonies, bright-eyed and talkative on three hours’ sleep, Atkins knew much of his work still lay ahead. A tiny, wiry man in a bomber jacket and fedora, Atkins still needed to execute every day’s medal ceremony and its attendant follow-up concert at B.C. Place and in Whistler. And early every morning throughout the Games, Atkins and his technical crews would be spending hours rehearsing the closing ceremonies scheduled for Feb. 28. A longer, bigger, looser affair than the tightly choreographed opening show, Atkins promised, with more celebrities.
Speaking to Maclean’s, Atkins was unapologetic about bringing an outsider’s perspective to Canada’s moment in the spotlight. He was able to examine Canada’s cultural inventory with fresh eyes, he said. “There are certain icons that are icons because they’re important and they have great significance. The fiddle was one. The drum was another. And the Rockies are another. There are certain things that exist in the culture of the country for a good reason. It’s more about how you interpret them and how you convey them than whether or not you include them.”
From the opening ceremony’s first moments, when a snowboarder burst out of a movie screen and through the Olympic rings at one end of the stadium, Jones’s show displayed something few CanCult events have managed to show: rhythm. A pulse. Atkins and Jones and the rest of their multinational creative team showed a willingness to speed through the stuff that didn’t need time. They dispatched the vice-regal salute to Michaëlle Jean in record time. An RCMP honour guard marched the Maple Leaf into the stadium double-time. But Atkins and Jones also chose to linger over other moments. They gave the 16-year-old chanteuse Nikki Yanofsky a splendidly languid O Canada to sing.
(The next day, Atkins was unmoved by word that some spectators thought it was a weird, diva-ish O Canada. “We could have done the anthem the way it’d be done at a hockey game. I just don’t know what that would have said about Canada in terms of distinguishing it, and using that moment to theatricalize the anthem.”)
Then came the arrival of the Aboriginal “hosts” from four southern B.C. First Nations and the appearance of four towering, translucent Salish welcome poles. Atkins knew some spectators would write this off as political correctness. He was unconcerned. “The best contemporary Aboriginal artists are taking the essence of their artwork and finding new media in which to bring it to a new audience. That’s what we tried to do as well.”
For the parade of athletes, little could be done. There were a lot of athletes. They paraded. The music was off-the-rack CTV Theme Song Peppy. The athletes looked beautiful, perhaps none more than South Korean bobsledder Kwang-Bae Kang, who beamed so broadly and waved his country’s flag so vigorously he seemed to brim over with the hope of the evening. When Canada’s team arrived, the applause was thunderous. Our heroes looked like home in their not-too-flashy red parkas and mittens. The theme-song music gave way to carnal, almost furious drumming while the team rounded the track. The only thing anywhere in sport that could have matched it for lusty foreboding is the haka, the Maori war chant the New Zealand rugby team uses to intimidate its foes. Here for the first time at these Games, but not for the last, a lusty eagerness to show some game face skated up to the edge of something dark and unnerving.
Nelly Furtado and Bryan Adams came out to perpetuate the amiable fiction that Canadians look fantastic and (in the case of Adams) never age. They sang a new Adams tune with about six words in the lyric, and then the huge white stage darkened and seemed to chill. Fabric facsimiles of the northern lights descended from the ceiling; a huge, luminous Stay-Puft Marshmallow Bear appeared, jetted itself briefly into the air like Paul Stanley from Kiss, and then sank beneath the—what? Waves? Computer-animated projections of Haida whales swam across the field and up in the fabric sky. The Alberta Ballet danced to a song by Sarah McLachlan. Ashley MacIsaac led an army of demonic fiddlers and dancers in a field of oversized maple leaves. Then Atkins and Jones conjured up something simpler and more magical from unlikely material: a lone figure dancing in air over images of wheat while the house audio system played a recording of Joni Mitchell’s decade-old reissue of her classic Both Sides Now.
It was one of two moments when Atkins and Jones replaced bluster with trust in the power of one strong voice. The second came when k.d. lang stood barefoot on top of a big gay-wedding cake, singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Last week, lang told Maclean’s she wouldn’t mind enforcing a moratorium on performances of Hallelujah. Apparently that had till Saturday, at the earliest, to begin, and I for one wouldn’t mind if it never did. Here, too, the Twitterverse grumbled a little that the song is overdone, but this is what it sounds like when a song is entering the Western canon, which this one surely is. Perhaps it took outsiders to give this song, sung by this woman, the unabashed adoration it has earned.
Enough torchbearers to fill a minivan came out to light the cauldron, and hydraulics failed to deliver enough cauldron bits up from beneath the floor to give everyone something to light. When the stakes are this high, the gremlins always manage to get their paws on a piece of the action. But the Games were begun, and at last the athletes had their chance to grab the spotlight away from all the distractions. That clear shot is all they have ever needed. The rest of this festival would be theirs.
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