In November 2022, newly appointed artistic director of the Olympic Games (OG), Thomas Jolly changed his life. He resigned from the Quai de Angers (national drama centre which he has directed since 2020) and embarked on the adventure of the Olympic Games.
Another challenge for this theatre artist who, in 2014, offered the public eighteen hours of an extraordinary Shakespearean performance (Henry VI). The director likes to push boundaries. Creator of operas, he is also the one who gave new life, in 2022, to the musical Starmania. So many experiences that led him to take charge of the four ceremonies of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. He remembers the strong moments, settles accounts with the theatre, while looking to the future with eyes that are still uncertain.
Do you have all the cards in hand to take stock of the Olympic adventure?
Honestly? Not at all! Everything has gone well since my appointment in September 2022. Since the end of July, we have had to hold a ceremony every two weeks. I didn’t even have time to watch them on television. I attended the last three from the control room or from the stands, at the Concorde and at the Stade de France. It was like a mix between the staging of an XXL opera and my experience at the Court of Honour in Avignon. At the opera, about a hundred people coordinate. Here there were 20,000. It’s huge, it’s nothing like an ordinary show.
Was the adventure a marathon or a sprint?
It was more of a marathon with, at the end, four hurdles to jump over. An incredible number of ideas lined up on the starting line and an incalculable number of obstacles presented themselves in front of each one. The budget, the technique, but also the weather, the heritage, the safety, the river and its bridges, the stability of the quays, etc. The marathon consisted, for me and my team, in transforming our ideas without denying our initial intentions, while slipping through the net.
We did it, even on July 26, in the persistent rain. I was devastated. I cried all day. But, in reality, this rain gave us immediacy. We were all, audience, technical teams, athletes, under the same unifying water. It united us. That day, the Parisian weather decided history.
How did you experience the growing curiosity surrounding the project?
There was something of the impossible in the project of Thierry Reboul, executive director of the Olympic ceremonies. This man moves the frames. By announcing the opening of the Seine, he created such a shock of reality that scepticism arose.
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