“El gran Teatro del Mundo” in Beijing (fourth part). The shame of being part of a propaganda theatre.

Closing Ceremony at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games (photo by Gustavo Thomas)

I’m walking under a beautiful blue sky, the temperature is pleasant and I breathe softly, deeply, I feel how the clean air enters. We’ve had only a few weeks like these and it feels like it could always have been like that, I wish it had always been like that.

The imposing buildings are still the frame of a grandeur that is not to come, but has already arrived, and that wants to stay long.

I’m living witness of a two week celebration, a celebration that was prepared by the governors of what will become the most powerful nation of my time. And today, once more, I dare discuss about it and, maybe, like all symbols of power, fear it.

China wanted to transform the perception the world had of her through the two weeks of the most important event (a sporting celebration) of our times, and in many ways she achieved it. The whole world became a spectator of her new Gran Teatro del Mundo that, like in the Baroque of the West, transformed the known landscape to give way to a symbolic idea of universal order on Earth (or of the new universal order).

Swamps became imposing gardens, country houses became gigantic palaces, small abbeys became gold-gilded monasteries; the king as the centre of the human universe, with everything revolving around him and, along with him, the rest of the characters of this great theatric play that god had imposed unto humanity. A philosophy of power.

Luxurious stagings, actors at their best, the presentation of an apparently new order with the pretext of an event like the Olympic Games, it was something we hadn’t seen since 1936 with Nazi Germany; a nation that presented itself as the upcoming imperial power and using the games to publicise it. I’m not confused, the differences between today’s China and the Germany of 1936 are extreme and evident, but the small similarities make me look at the blue sky and realise it’s the deceiving sky of an invented Beijing, like in a theatre play, planning the coming of a new game of lies that you must learn to decipher.

When, in college, I argued about the death or survival of theatre, I didn’t appreciate fully its usefulness in the life of nations and ideologies; I saw the propaganda, but not the setting on stage as an evident medium for assimilating it. Like in the Baroque, where it wasn’t the christian god who dictated the universal order but men, it’s not the omnipotence of the Chinese communist government (or that strange idea of the government of the people) who dictated the order, but a few men who hold power; those are the authors of a new play planned for two weeks, to tell the world “it’s us who’s coming, believe in us, enjoy with us, realise what we can and what we want!”. I’m tempted to say that their way of reacting to surprises like violence in Tibet, the Sichuan earthquake and the protests and threats before the games, were part of that great planning. It’s not completely true, of course, but improvisation is also the art of planning.

James Reynolds, a BBC reporter, wondered about the strange way local Chinese leaders transmitted the news of upcoming events, with absolute preparation: at the last event of the olympic torch relay at the Great Wall, reporters received a communiqué at 6 am with a summary of the events, written in the past tense, related to things that would happen hours later; it talked not just about events, but also about the way the people reacted, their shouts and impulses; what’s most surprising is that hours later, when everything had happened, it had happened as it had been written: not just the order of events, but the assurance of the planning of the people’s spirit, their impulses, their passions. The fears of science fiction have always been present here.

The last day of the games I had the luck of having a ticket for the closing ceremony, a ceremony I had dreamt of going to since I was a child (it didn’t matter whether it was Beijing, Paris, London...); but once there, with all the lies weighing heavily after 3 years and 2 weeks of living the Olympic Beijing, it seemed too much, the last disgusting spectacle of an enormous amusement park which I should have never entered to.

Like a naive mortal in the Versailles of the 17th century, I wandered around that huge olympic dragon-shaped park, amongst lakes, walkways, singing fountains and immense and unique buildings; I entered the olympic stadium and readied myself for watching the spectacle prepared by the Chinese Vatel (or, worse, the Chinese Leni Riefenstahl, as some people call him), Zhang Yimou. Nothing new, performance-wise, everything had already been seen in Barcelona, Seoul, Atlanta, Athens, but here it was more fabulous, gigantic, immense; not five, not ten, but one thousand, two thousand performers per act; a thousand here, another thousand there; apotheotic images, like in a film for masses; the problem was not what to imagine, but how much to spend.

Gustavo Thomas (this blog’s author) at Beijing’s olympic stadium during the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games (August 24th, 2008)

Me, like the other 90 thousand spectators there (including dozens of foreign dignitaries and people from the Chinese government), missed the true performance that was shown on TV; prepared with TV in mind, the closing ceremony was lacking in a theatric way (that is, live): it lacked a unifying structure, there was too much attention to changes and movement, but on TV there were no mistakes; me and thousands of spectators sitting on my side couldn’t see the flame extinguishing itself, but everyone on TV saw it; we were too busy lighting our torches at the right moment and ready to cry right there; this, like other details of that ceremony, were available for me to watch only two days after, at home.


Then, I started thinking again, and ire came: I was part of the show, a theatrical show created for the TV screen, to become an image through the media; I was another actor within that great theatre of the Chinese world, not a spectator like my ticket said, or, in any case, my role was that of a foreign spectator coming to praise in awe the new Chinese dream machine. Yes, when I got to the stadium, I got a bag, not with olympic souvenirs, but with props to be used during different parts of the show; a group of masters of ceremony appeared before the beginning of the TV transmission and gave us indications of what to do, when and how to do things with our props, all in a very Chinese way, smiling and inviting us to share. It was probably already written in the news bulletin, my shouts, my smiles, how I would react to the show and its surprises; someone had already told days or months before what we’d all do and what we’d all feel during the games, during the closing ceremony.

I enjoyed being there, no doubt, I enjoyed seeing proud Chinese singing their anthem, I enjoyed seeing a tower build itself and get filled with thousands of minute beings as in a Griffith film, creating a babel tower (a torch, in fact), I was moved thinking about the likeness of those masses on the stage-stadium with those of the first version of King Kong in the thirties of the 20th century, but it was (as it is now) extremely unpleasant to have been part, without being aware of it, of a repugnant propaganda theatre.

With this I finish my writing about the Olympic Beijing (the Baroque parties also had to finish, and were later forgotten). I still live in China, I still enjoy its culture and achievements, I keep spending all my money in this country eating, traveling and enjoying; therefore, I’ll keep sharing my personal creations, China’s performing arts, and what happens around these.

Video with my view within the stadium during the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games.

The last day. My view from inside the stadium. from Gustavo Thomas on Vimeo.

"El Gran Teatro del mundo" in Beijing (Third Part). The preparations for that setting on stage

Coming to Beijing and living the Olympic Games in this city was supposed to become the materialising of a child’s broken dream. Forty years later, my personal experience relived the myth of a harmonious spirituality for the games; I saw the new reality that broke down into a number of critical ideas that, I must admit, were seeped in the total mistrust of its organisers, the International Olympic Committee, the government of the People’s Republic of China and the enterprises that supported them.

The persistent news about the way Beijing was preparing for the Olympics and the stories of friends that had lived in the city for many years introduced me completely into just the atmosphere the Chinese government didn’t want us to feel (the Chinese government has a way of indicating what must be thought, to whoever and wherever).

The plans for the party were impressive and included all the aspects of life, if not in all of China, at least in Beijing: the infrastructure of the city, the weather, the people, the athletes, safety and culture.

The City

You had to turn Beijing, before the start of the games, into a first world spot: transport, housing, stadiums, gyms, hotels, malls, and buildings that should become icons of Chinese progress. A long list of transformations were supposed to take place in an already existing city.

In three years I saw huge housing complexes from the communist era fall, and saw the rise, in their place, of new, luxurious and modern complexes where it was not the inhabitants of the old buildings (where 3-4 families were crowded in the same apartment) who would live there, but the new. emerging middle and high classes of the new China. In less than 3 years some 10 enormous shopping malls were built, with thousands of shops from all over the world. I saw the inauguration of an airport, three subway lines, the National Centre for the Arts (know as “the Egg”); I saw the construction of the wonderful CCTV tower (the offices for the official Chinese TV station), of the Olympic Green with the National Stadium (the Bird’s Nest) and the Swimming Stadium (the Water Cube), the 81 floor World Trade Centre tower; I watched how hutongs were renovated (and how many were destroyed), and how streets were renovated and reinvented through an imperial past (Qianmen); I saw how the Forbidden City was painted anew, as well as the Temple of Heaven, the hallways and towers of the Summer Palace, the Academy of Confucius, and dozens of smaller touristic spots.

The noise from machines, from explosions at construction sites, the voices of the workers themselves accompanied me for at least two years and a half.

Today I marvel at the speed of that transformation, at the architecture of some buildings, and at the same time I ask myself about the future of the thousands that were displaced as well as the thousands I saw work in deplorable conditions. Coming from a country like Mexico, I can recognise those conditions perfectly.

The staging of the performance, of the great theatre, would be sumptuous, unrivaled...

The Weather

China promised ecological games, with pure and clean air, with buildings made from non polluting materials and renewable energy. Achieving that would prove possible on one hand (in the case of the buildings) and impossible on the other (the clean and pure air).

I remember my reply to an employee from the Embassy of Mexico in China, when she asked how Beijing looked when I first arrived: gray. Coming from Beirut, where sun and clear skies are the norm 300 days a year, the pollution of the Chinese capital was more than evident to me. With polluting factories in a valley of just some hundreds of square kilometres, with millions of cars and an indiscriminate use of coal for heating and energy, it seemed impossible that the organisers could deliver their clean and pure air promise. It sounded like there had to be some deceiving solution, and there was.

Even when preparations for avoiding pollutants were programmed in the government’s plans, the progress for the summer of 2008 were minimal; growth was, inevitable, the top priority. Then the somewhat logical solution appeared: if the celebrations were going to last two weeks (or a month, if you include the paralympic games), cutting down the number of vehicles on the streets by half, closing factories in a 30km radius around the city and stopping all building within the city should help achieve the theatric goal, the deception.

During the first week of the olympics we had blue clean skies the like of which we’d never seen, no excessive tiredness due to pollution, even a temperature considerably cooler than previous years.

It seemed this “temporary” solution provided the “temporary” frame needed for the theatre to come.

The People

The government launched an enormous campaign to try to make Chinese more educated and civilised. Campaigns against spitting have existed in China since the arrival of communists to power, at least, but this habit was as ingrained as other hygienic and civil customs which differed from the west (like queuing to enter a place, for example), the race against time seemed lost without better education and without the feeling of humiliation that such acts represent in other societies.

Beijing, with a local population favoured by economic growth and by the civic responsibility of being the host city for the olympics and the representative of the whole of China during the games, needed just a bit of that campaign to achieve the required attitude, but the real problem were the millions of immigrant workers, Chinese as well, with their legal residence in other provinces, yet who live permanently in the capital. The lack of education, of social contact and civic responsibility (their main worry being finding a job to send money back to their families living in misery) made it practically impossible to achieve such a radical change in their social conduct. The solution to that, like for the weather, had to be temporary as well, with another theatric deception: the government decreed the exit of them all, of absolutely everybody without legal residence in Beijing, and those millions had to disappear for a month, like the factories and the ongoing constructions.

The casting for the extras for the great performance had been successful.

The Athletes

Even though the preparation of athletes for the Olympic Games would seem like a contradiction to my idea of a stage performance created for just two weeks of competitions, in reality there are two sides to it, as in that which is built with an express purpose. It is an investment that will give the country a concrete result long term (medals and gold medals and glory for the Chinese, of course), but it is also a medium for exalting ideas and images required by the government and its policy in this exact moment of its history.

The politics of media for presenting Chinese athletes was charged with an undisputed sense of nationalism and exalting of the Chinese as a race: every one of the athletes was carefully photographed to look handsome, strong, big, powerful; they wore make-up, they were dressed with the best sports attire, shown half-naked and showing their muscles; their profiles were praised, as well as their effort and their chances for winning. Without knowing it for sure, I dare say that no negative news or criticism was allowed; everything was hope, a desire for winning, the praising of their capabilities.

The athletic-nationalist propaganda was fruitful, the Chinese were at the top of the medal tally, with the only mistakes being the waste of time and money on stars that didn’t deliver (Yao Ming and Liu Xing), and the terrible surprise that what the world would remember Beijing as the glory of swimmer Michael Phelp’s 8 medals and the three medals of Bolt, the Jamaican runner.

Safety

Living in China means living in a safe country: crime is minimal and, in general, terrorism hasn’t made its appearance, with the exception of some well defined regions. The media are mostly controlled by the state, the government gives the guidelines for what not to say and, sometimes, of what to say, and sometimes what to say in a very precise way, or what to stop seeing. The same applies to art and education, and even more to politics and religion. Freedom exists within the causeways the government, legitimate holder of national sovereignty, dictates; and that’s when security reaches further.

I had never seen so many security measures (and I must say I’ve been in London and New York at times of great paranoia due to terrorism). The city was under siege by security forces, who didn’t let anyone enter or leave without express permission, knocking on every door to check we had all our papers in order (I had to leave for Thailand to get a new visa); nightclubs had to be safe, without drug-dealers or prostitutes for others to see.

Once more, the performance would last two weeks (or a whole month) and everything had to run smoothly, without conflict; and so it was. There was no street violence (except for an unfortunate incident of an American stabbed to death), no political violence (there were minimal demonstrations), and no terrorism (at least not in Beijing).

My way to the olympic stadium on the day of the closing ceremony was clearly indicated by three security lines: the volunteers that told me which way to go and which not to go; the police that would stop me if I was going the wrong way; and the army that, like toy soldiers, stood stern, firm, in their places at the back. Even though you were free to express your joy, it was impossible not to feel intimidation towards your freedom of action, and I wondered, how far within the legality these people had dictated was I? when would I cross the line? At least, until the end of the games, I wasn’t a danger for security, and I’m glad I wasn’t.

Culture

China created its present cultural policy due to the events of 20th Century’s last years, Tian’anmen the main of them. After the rebirth, experimenting and opening of the arts during the era of Deng Xiaoping, the Tian’anmen massacre marked the whole of the Chinese cultural sphere. Most of the initiators and supporters of the movement had been artists, poets, writers, and stage performers who worked towards a dream millions had had in 1968, a dream that reached China more than 20 years late and with clear particularities.

The answer to that all, among others, of course, was an impressive control over every “message”, be it direct or hidden, within an artistic piece. As mass media, the arts had a non-written code where the government censored based on the piece itself.

The Chinese government has taken part in the liberty and punishment game when that freedom is taken too far. The artist must be sensible and sensitive enough to know what he writes, films, edits or paints, and to tread up to where sight and eye allow and live with that.

The preparations covered two spheres, what was allowed, and what was not allowed. Within what was allowed were traditional arts, TV, dance, visual arts, comic theatre and musicals, as well as commercial films which praised Chinese history and the Chinese nation. Zhang Yimou was chosen as the stage director and creator of the opening and closing ceremonies, and he was chosen for being redeemed by the new China; famous for his first inroads in cinema, and accused by the government of that time for poisoning China’s image abroad, thanks to the new cultural policy he becomes close to the government and begins a glorious career of praising the Chinese nation, its history and achievements, and is “accused” by many today for being the Leni Riefenstahl of the Chinese communist party’s new philosophy (“the glory of Chinese past”).
And within what was not allowed... everything else (think about it).

*

So many preparations and in so little time had turned the daily life of a citizen of Beijing into something truely surreal; that which stood one day disappeared the next, what had been censored out of the blue weeks before was allowed during the two olympic weeks (my blog was one of those surprises); with no immigrant workers around, Beijing became a clean city, civilised, educated, pleasing; the air was breathable and there were plants everywhere; everywhere was safe, with no excesses, protests, alterations of order, without accessible hookers nor gay saunas; yes, the surprise was driving me mad. The were going to make it... for two weeks.

Could I stop thinking about theatre, and in particular about the kind of theatre that transformed the “visible” world of the great capitals of the Baroque?

The idea kept coming back to my mind, the idea of that "Gran Teatro del Mundo" of the Baroque, which transformed cities, was forging Beijing. (1)





(1) Of course the Chinese possess a long tradition of theatricality in their social life, with an obsession for showing, in an artificial way, their best face to visitors, and hiding or erasing any trace that could lend itself to criticism.

"El Gran Teatro del Mundo" in Beijing (Second Part). Those marvelous buildings as a stage design.

It is said that Romans built large avenues and triumph arcs for welcome their victorious armies; it is said that Renaissance and Baroque European kings adorned their cities and built marvelous monuments only for 5 or 10 day-festivity; it is also said that a Chinese Emperor liked to travel through Yangtse river accompanied by 2000 members of his court and transformed the landscape of every part the procession passed by.

Now we can say... It is said that at the beginning of the 21st Century Beijing astonished the World , the city was transformed for a two-week sport party and many marvelous buildings were built for the occasion.

This is an only visual post, showing those buildings created as stage design for two weeks of a glorious theatrical production.

(Every one of these videos were recorded by the author's Blog)

National Centre for The Performing Arts ( The Egg). Day view.



National Centre for The Performing Arts (The Egg). Night View.



CCTV Tower and the CBD

National Stadium (The Bird's Nest)

Nada from Gustavo Thomas on Vimeo.

Swimming National Stadium (The Water Cube)

"El Gran Teatro del Mundo" in Beijing (First part). Forty years ago...

(Translation from Spanish by Tadeo Berjón)


Mao and the Cultural Revolution in China

Forty years ago, when China was suffering the obscurity of its Cultural Revolution and none of us knew anything about it except myths and, amongst those, the biggest of all, the myth of Mao Zedong...

Swimmers reading the red book during the cultural revolution times (photo by Li Zhenshen)

Around 1968 there were four events in my life which marked by my early infancy: the death of Federico, my elder brother; my tonsilectomy with a short but traumatizing hospital stay; the World Cup of 1970; and the Mexico Olympic Games of 1968.

Being part of a family intimately linked to sports (1) the myth of great sports events fed my imagination for many years.

Official logo of the Mexico 1968 Olympics

I was born during the preparations for those games, but I was not aware of them nor of the Olympics until years later, thanks to the continuous retellings of the event by both the media and my family: about the opening and closing ceremonies, the competitions where Mexico won medals, the story of Vera Cavlavska and her love for Mexico, the sad and unpleasant story of sergeant Pedraza and his huge effort to achieve an impossible gold medal.


But something that left a mark in my personal memories was the stories about the atmosphere; if there was something that became a myth in my mind, it was the way in which people expected and lived the Olympics. I spent years trying to relive all that, editing it in my mind and replaying it in my games; being a stage person as I’ve always been, I spent whole days staging a city preparing for the Olympics, I relived the ceremonies, I relived the roar of the crowds.

With the passing of the years, my child-like olympic dream and me, creator of the dream, organized more olympic games, thinking of the joy and the encounters, the shows and glories of winning and of hosting them. Munich passed unnoticed, regardless of Mark Spitz and that despicable terrorist attack that scandalised the world; but not Montreal and Nadia Comaneci (and no attention paid to the absence of African countries in protest to the inclusion of Southafrica); Moscow didn’t go unnoticed for me, either, nor the boycott, which offended me so that I followed closely the news on newspapers and media, collecting and recording hundreds of news pieces so that the world in the future could have a clear recollection of facts that made it understand that the boycott was due to something separate from sport, that political interests were attacking the spirit of the games. I was not a child anymore (almost), adolescence was beginning to wreak havoc in me, I’d follow the games in a more mature way, there would be no more stage recreations of my idea of the games.

Then, there would be years of sportive obscurity, as art and theatre made an overwhelming appearance in my life.

A case I remember with certain curiosity, amongst my “clairvoyant” games of creation and recreation of future olympic games, was the organising of one of them in Beijing, which I wrongly calculated would take place in 2010. Without an inkling of Chinese culture I designed the opening and closing ceremonies with the inclusion of just one Chinese song I found at home and dozens of other musical pieces from all over the world; robots and space ships took part in the ceremonies, and China lead the medal tally above the US, the USRR and Mexico (among the leading countries); yes, China was a sports power with a great number of medals, and Mexico a new sport power emerged. Now I laugh at the strange fact, and I remain pensive on what I see now

Gustavo Díaz Ordaz opens the Mexico 1968 Olympic Games

Many years had to pass by, many, beyond the age of myths, to find an imaginative link between those glorious olympics organised in Mexico, my family’s recollections, and the student movement of 1968 (2); even harder was to link the massacre of Tlaltelolco with the games themselves. I was not closed to the idea, it was just that the propaganda that had penetrated into my family managed to keep those things separate. Nobody was denying the existence of a massacre just ten days before the games, but nobody linked it to the happiness and glory of what was about to happen.

When I was an adolescent I asked my mother about the subject, and she would answer that the government didn’t want any problems and had the students killed, and therefore there were no problems. On her face I could read fear, the fear all ordinary people in Mexico had when talking about those turbulent years.

Images of the Tlaltelolco massacre of October 1968, Mexico

Mexico had shown the world a country with economic growth, friendly, well organised, and words and more words that praised something that, with time, the world would forget. Mexico was an iron dictatorship that was organised in such a way that made the country work; the games were militarised and people could not protest, the impressive budget was a scandal when you took into account the millions of impoverished mexicans, the government would expropriate whole areas of the city (that was common policy for any kind of public works) for the building of roads and olympic venues; what mattered was to show a harmonious, beautiful, proud country. Today, 40 years later, I’ve lived similar sentences in olympic Beijing.

The 1968 myth, like many other myths, vanished from my life when I met “the teachers” that opened my eyes to other realities, the myths died when I looked for individuality and for free thought and when I began the race against time to educate myself and to understand events and the secrets behind them.

Opening ceremony at the 1968 Olympic Games

(1) My father loved football and found his way into coaching juvenile teams; three of my brothers played football with the goal of become professional players, and one of my sisters would later become a high-level gymnast.
(2) In a similar way, the 1970 World Cup and the events of those years lead to a less famous, but no less despicable, massacre in 1971.

A Coca Cola Spectacle at The Place (Beijing Olympics 2008)

Coca Cola Multimedia Spectacle at The Place (Beijing 2008)

There is too much to say about Beijing Olympics and I have had to wait till tonight that everything is finished (I have just seen the Closing Ceremony at The National Stadium) to start thinking about it. But now I must work on it, thinking about what I have seen during three years of Chinese preparatives and, of course, these last two weeks of competitions, and then make some conclusions. It will take some time.

In a while it doesn't harm anyone to see a little bit how Coca Cola spent its money giving its own Olympic spectacle to Beijingers.

So, this is a video showing extracts from the Coca Cola Multimedia Spectacle at The Place (Shimao Tianjie in Chinese pinyin), that famous shopping mall with the largest sky screen in the World.

No criticism (Coca Cola has been criticized for so many years), no more comments, just these two videos:

Coca Cola Spectacle (Beijing 2008)

Chinese boys having fun at Coca Cola fair (Beijing 2008)

More posts are coming with the same kind of content: simple things in video showing the ambiance, the venues, and how I have lived this important event (Beijing Olympics Games) I consider "the biggest theatrical production in history".