Watching the opening extravaganza at the Sochi Winter Olympics, we experienced the combination of two things not often combined in our modern culture. We saw the most opulent display of technology one can imagine used to enhance the most opulent music and dance found in Western Culture. Russian music, Russian dance, history, and technology, in a perfect weave.
The caramel melodies from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, the grandeur of Borodin’s Slava chorus and Polovetsian Dances, the magnetic rhythms from Stravinsky’s Petrushka and the energy of [Armenian-Soviet era] Khachaturian, plus much more – all were expressed by magnificent dance and enhanced by staggeringly beautiful, complex floating sets and geometrical props. It was flawlessly executed by a cast of thousands . . . in classic Russian style. And a little child, floating above it all, indeed did lead them.
What a show. I was knocked speechless by it. I was proud of an artistic culture that has owned my heart since I was a teen. But the thing that pleases me the most is the fact that we rarely see technology used for beauty.
Oh, I know, the Apple Store is beautiful after a fashion. And so too are other things we could point to. But on this kind of scale, with this kind of serious budget and cutting-edge flash and bang? When does that happen?
Technology swept us through a panoply of Russian history that took us to the origins of the nomadic Slavs, and back through the Riurik Princes, the era of Peter the Great, the lyrical tragedies of War and Peace, the explosion of the Revolution and Futurism, the darkness of loss in World War II, and the many threads of rebuilding in Cold War times, all to be floated away by a child dancing so many meters up in the air, it’s unfathomable.
It shows what can be done with a combination of beauty, technology, and tradition.
I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.