When it comes to organizing the opening ceremony of the Olympics, host countries compete in ingenuity, originality and suspense. Such a ceremony always involves a huge number of artists, dancers and stunt people who amaze the audience with their unusual performance. Directing such a show is also the job of people who are endowed with highly complex artistic vision.
The opening gala of the Youth Olympic Games in Nanjing in 2014 is an amazing example. The grandiose show is built on themes that define China’s history, but are universally human as well: astronomy, porcelain and the Silk Road, both at sea and on dry.
One of the most spectacular moments was marked by a human pyramid made up of 500 stunt artists, who practically flew in the air in constant controlled motion, and only occasionally joined their hands and feet to form a giant human kaleidoscope.
In the same show, the artists dramatized the armillary sphere, invented by Chinese astronomer Zhang Heng 1900 years ago. To be able to perform flawlessly in all these grandiose moments, the 4,000 artists trained intensively for six months, and 4,800 costumes were created.