Four days later, the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games continued to provoke reactions around the world on Tuesday, from Donald Trump – who called it a “disgrace” – to French DJ Barbara Butch – at the heart of the scene involving drag queens – who filed a complaint for cyberbullying.
“I’m very open-minded, but I thought what they did was a disgrace,” the Republican presidential candidate said in an interview with Fox News.
Like many far-right politicians in Europe, the former US president was offended by the scene featuring drag queens, which some interpreted as a mockery of Jesus’ last meal with his apostles, the Last Supper, something the organisers denied.
A sequence at the center of which was Barbara Butch, feminist and lesbian activist, who since her performance has been “the target of yet another cyber-harassment – particularly violent,” she denounced on Instagram on Monday.
The artist filed a complaint on Tuesday for aggravated cyberbullying, death threats and aggravated public insults.
“Insult to religion”
The controversy surrounding this painting had begun to swell even though the show was not yet over on Friday, with voices on the right and the far right expressing indignation at a “woke” opening ceremony, with a vision that “seeks to ridicule Christians”, like the Frenchwoman Marion Maréchal or the Italian Matteo Salvini.
The French episcopate deplored the “excess and provocation” of certain passages of a ceremony which “unfortunately included scenes of derision and mockery of Christianity”, and Younan Hano, Syriac Catholic Archbishop of Mosul, criticised an “insult to religion but also to humanity”, calling on Iraqi Christians to fast in response.
For its part, Al-Azhar, one of the most prestigious institutions of Sunni Islam based in Egypt, condemned in a statement “the scenes of disrespect towards Christ” and “the promotion of homosexuality.”
“You will never find in me any desire to mock, to denigrate anything,” assured Thomas Jolly this weekend, artistic director of the ceremony, denying having been inspired by the Last Supper and affirming that he wanted to make “a big pagan celebration.”
“What is certain is that with Thomas Jolly, we never spoke about religion, nor about the Last Supper,” he added on Tuesday in the columns of the French newspaper The world the singer Philippe Katerine, whose appearance as a blue, glittery and almost naked Dionysus at the end of this scene also caused a reaction.
“Stunned” by these reactions, the singer, who specifies that he grew up in the Christian religion, formulated a mea culpa. “The most beautiful thing in this faith is the idea of forgiveness. So forgiveness, if I could have let a misunderstanding pass, if I could have shocked people. I am very sorry. I believe that forgiveness can be reciprocal,” he affirmed.
“The Smurf Artist”
French historian Patrick Boucheron, who helped write the show, pointed out to the World that it had been conceived as a “manifesto against fear.”
“Why should we let ourselves be intimidated by ideologues, virtuosos in the art of hatred? They want to separate us for the sole reason that we are different, when so many people continue to want to live together,” he hammered home.
The television production of the show was criticized by Thomas Jolly. He said the director had “missed a lot of moments” but the subsidiary of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) responsible for filming the ceremony, OBS (Olympic Broadcasting Services), denied any failure to AFP on Tuesday, although it acknowledged difficulties related to the rain and the scale of the show.
According to OBS, only one of the scenes planned for the four hours of the show was not included in the broadcast, namely the passage of the Patrouille de France above the Grand Palais at the end of the Marseillaise sung by mezzo-soprano Axelle Saint-Cirel.
Despite these controversies, the ceremony aroused emotion and almost unanimous enthusiasm, including abroad.
Philippe Katerine’s Dionysus has become a trend on social networks in China, where he is nicknamed “the Smurf artist”.