ANCIENT OLYMPIA, Greece – No one knows what music sounded like in ancient Greece or how dancers once moved.
Every two years, a new interpretation of the old performance attracts a global audience. It takes place in southern Greece, in a place that many still consider sacred: the birthplace of the Olympic Games.
Forty-eight artists, chosen in part for their resemblance to the ancient youth seen in statues and other surviving works of art, will take part in the flame-lighting ceremony for the Paris Olympic Games on Tuesday.
Details of the 30-minute performance are fine-tuned – and kept secret – until the public rehearsal on Monday.
The Associated Press had rare access to rehearsals taking place over the weekends, mainly at an Olympic indoor cycling track in Athens.
As cyclists spin around them on the tilted cycling oval, Olympic athletes, all volunteers, strike poses from antique vases. Sequences are repeated and re-repeated under the direction of hyper-focused choreographer Artemis Ignatiou.
“There used to be no Olympic flame ceremony,” Ignatiou said during a recent training session.
“My inspiration comes from the pediments of the temples, the images on the vases, because there is nothing that has been preserved – no movement, no dance – from antiquity,” she said. “So basically what we’re doing is putting these images together. Everything in between comes from us.”
Ceremonies take place in Olympia every two years for the Winter and Summer Games, with the sun’s rays focused inside a parabolic mirror to produce the Olympic flame and begin the torch relay to the host city.
Women dressed as priestesses are at the center of the ceremony, first held at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Leading the group is an actress who plays the role of high priestess and makes a dramatic appeal to Apollo, the ancient sun god, for help moments before the torch is lit.
Over the decades, new ingredients were progressively added: music, choreography, new costume colors, male performers known as “kouroi” and subtle stylistic additions to pay homage to the culture of the host country of the Olympic Games.
Increased complexity has also introduced controversy, inevitably amplified by social media. This year’s criticism focused on the dresses and tunics worn by the artists, designed to resemble ancient Greek columns. Critics considered this a rude departure from the ceremony’s usual elegance.
Organizers hope the costume will create a more positive impression when seen in the ruins of ancient Olympia.
Counting the sequences, Ignatiou controls the music with taps on his cell phone as he follows the velodrome dancers working through a stop motion routine and the women who pass by them like a slowly unwinding spring.
Ignatiou has been involved in the ceremony for 36 years, as priestess, high priestess, assistant and main choreographer since 2008. She takes criticism with composure.
She still cries when describing the lighting of the flame, but lets her dancers describe their five-month experience of participating in the training.
Mostly in their early twenties, the performers are selected from dance and theater academies with the aim of maintaining an athletic appearance and classic Greek aesthetic, the women with hair tied back in elegant double braids.
Christiana Katsimpraki, a 23-year-old theater student participating in Olympia for the first time, said she wants to repay the kindness shown by older performers.
“Before I go to bed, when I close my eyes, I do the whole choreography – a sprint – to make sure I have memorized all the steps and they are in the right order,” she said. “It’s so that the next time I can go to rehearsal everything goes well and no one gets tired.”
The ceremony is performed with sparse music, and final modifications to the routine are made at Olympia, in part to deal with the site’s bumpy and uneven terrain.
The dancers describe the fun they have in message groups, the good-natured jokes played on newcomers, and the fun they have on the four-hour bus ride to the ancient site in southern Greece – but also the significance of the moment and the attraction of the past.
“I’m amazed that we’re going there and that I’m part of this whole team,” said 23-year-old artist Kallia Vouidaski. “I’m going to live this whole experience that I watched when I was little on TV. I would say, ‘Ah! It would be really cool if I could do that at some point.’ And I did it.”
The flame lighting ceremony will begin at 08:30 GMT on Tuesday. A separate ceremony handing over the flame to the Paris 2024 organizing committee will be held in Athens on April 26.
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Gatopoulos reported from Athens.
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AP Coverage of the Paris Olympics:
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