Art of Language 01.1 Closing Ceremony

CLOSING CEREMONY … OPENING DAY

 

If you were a journalist in London reporting on the Closing Ceremony for an audience back home – an audience that DID NOT see the ceremony on television – what would you say about the Closing Ceremonies?

What three words would you use to describe the Closing Ceremony?

What essential things would your audience need to know?

What details would be especially helpful?

What two pictures would are be especially helpful?

 

 

 

Thousands of journalists wrote about last night’s Closing Ceremony. Three excerpts are pasted below. Please read them.

Do the article excerpts answer any of the most important questions?

What details are helpful?

Are these articles written in a way that makes you want to continue reading?

NOTE: Write down the words you don’t understand.

 

 

** NUMBER 1

(FROM THE ASSOCIATED PRESS WIRE SERVICE)

London brought the curtain down on a hugely entertaining Olympics with a sensational rock ‘n roll nostalgia tour of a closing ceremony that thrilled the London night with top-of-the-chart classics, supermodels and psychedelic mayhem. …

The three-hour extravaganza offered a sensory blast including rock ‘n’ roll rickshaws, dustbin percussionists, an exploding yellow car and a marching band in red tunics and bearskin hats.

The Spice Girls staged a show-stopping reunion, and Monty Python’s Eric Idle sauntered through “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” – accompanied by Roman centurions, Scottish bagpipers and a human cannonball.

It all made for a madcap mashup that had 80,000 fans at Olympic Stadium stomping, cheering and singing along. Organizers estimated 300 million or more were watching around the world.

 

** NUMBER 2

(FROM LONDON NEWSPAPER “THE GUARDIAN”)

The great festival that began with the stirring resonances of Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony came to a poignant end with a light-hearted pageant of British popular culture.

An exploding Reliant Robin featured, along with Take That and the Spice Girls, the voices of John Lennon and Freddie Mercury, Tim Spall as Winston Churchill, Julian Lloyd Webber, Kate Moss in Alexander McQueen, an airborne Darcey Bussell, Madness, the Pet Shop Boys, Ray Davies singing Waterloo Sunset, and the thousands of athletes from 204 countries who had kept us enthralled and enraptured.

To follow Boyle’s Isles of Wonder with Kim Gavin’s Symphony of British Music was a bit like switching from Ready Steady Go! to Top of the Pops, albeit with the same mind-boggling shuffling of scenery, dazzling choreography and brilliant use of lighting.

British sports cars of the 1960s circled the track and giant models of the Albert Hall and the Shard were replaced by a shattered sculpture reformed to create the face of Lennon while the crowd sang the words to Imagine.

It was, as promised, more cacophonous than symphonic. Bradley Wiggins will have loved the parade of 50 Vespas and Lambrettas, lights blazing and raccoon tails rampant, that accompanied Kaiser Chiefs’ ardent version of Pinball Wizard.

Jessie J, Tinie Tempah and Taio Cruz performed from moving Rolls-Royce convertibles, like an extended advert for the best of British bling, while Russell Brand sang I Am the Walrus from a psychedelic bus that metamorphosed into a giant transparent octopus from which Fatboy Slim delivered a short DJ set. When the Spice Girls sang from the top of black cabs, the Olympics seemed to have turned into the Motor Show.

Last of all, after the speeches, Rio de Janeiro’s preview of 2016 and the extinguishing of Thomas Heatherwick’s cauldron, came the surviving members of the Who, closing the Games with the adrenaline shot of My Generation, although the real anthem of London 2012 had undoubtedly been David Bowie’s Heroes.

There was no message, and nor did there need to be, except “Wasn’t it fun?” and “Aren’t we great?” But Damien Hirst’s tie-dyed rendering of the union flag, filling the ground on which the world’s finest athletes had run and jumped and thrown their way into history, reminded those suspicious of raucous patriotism of how great the union flag suddenly looked when it was ripped out of the hands of the extreme right and wrapped around the shoulders of Jessica Ennis or Mo Farah.

 

** NUMBER 3

(FROM US NEWSPAPER “THE NEW YORK TIMES)

LONDON — With a gaudy three-hour farewell that mashed up theater, acrobatics, fashion and a few generations of musical idols, London extinguished the Olympic torch Sunday night, capping two weeks of athletic achievements with a jukebox collection of songs and a marathon display of endearingly wacky stagecraft.

It felt as if the Games had suddenly been programmed by England’s version of the Chamber of Commerce, which decided to take advantage of this final moment in the international spotlight to produce one long and kinetic ad for the country’s pop culture.

Among those appearing on stage were Ray Davies, Fatboy Slim, Jessie J, George Michael, the Spice Girls, Russell Brand and Eric Idle, who led the crowd in a version of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” while surrounded by skating nuns. The Who closed the evening with “My Generation,” after a number of speeches and dance numbers to hand off the Games to Rio de Janeiro, which will host in 2016.

It was an elaborate and at times earsplitting spectacle, which unfolded in an 80,000-seat stadium, built in the Olympic park in a borough of east London that had been transformed from a toxic dump into the center of the athletic universe. The connection between Sunday night’s coda and the Games came courtesy of a few hundred athletes, who were assembled in the middle of the stadium and were entertained or dumbfounded by the proceedings.

These competitors were given cameos at this show, but they provided so many remarkable performances in the last few weeks that picking a single standout is a challenge. One choice is Michael Phelps, who became the most garlanded Olympian in history, after winning four golds and two silvers here, running his career total to 22 medals, 18 of them gold. In the end, he was given a special trophy, which looked like a piece of pewter shrapnel stuck to a base, that read “Greatest Olympic Athlete of All Time.”