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      in Music

      After Olympic Show, ‘Love Activist’ D.J. Barbara Butch Deals With Hate

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      The Paris Olympics opening ceremony made the French D.J. Barbara Butch famous and infamous around the world. Already known in France as an outspoken lesbian and activist for fat people, Butch — her stage name, of course — appeared with a crown and her mixing board in one of the last scenes, called “Festivity.”For 45 minutes, dancers, including drag queens, showcased their talent along a raised catwalk that stretched down the stage before, at the very end, the French singer Philippe Katerine emerged from under a giant silver dome, painted entirely in blue and wearing little clothing, to sing part of “Nude,” one of his songs.The scene incited an almost instant public fury, particularly among those who interpreted it as parodying Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” and, by extension, mocking Christianity. Even after the ceremony’s artistic director, Thomas Jolly, explained the inspiration was a grand pagan festival connected to the gods of Olympus, the fury continued, with Donald J. Trump calling the scene “a disgrace” on social media.On Monday, Butch filed a complaint for cyber-harassment, and the Paris prosecutor’s office opened an investigation for discrimination based on religion or sexual orientation. The next day, Jolly followed suit, and an investigation was opened into his case, too.Delegations arrive at the Trocadero during the Olympics opening ceremony as spectators watch the French singer Philippe Katerine performing on a giant screen.Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesButch has become accustomed to hate, though not at this level. She is a Jew from a working-class family who grew up in a small apartment above her parents’ restaurant in Paris, and antisemitism had provoked her grandmother to leave France for Israel years ago, she said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Opening Ceremony Misses the Boat

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      The Paris Games began with a new look and sparkled with Celine Dion. But the show suffered from bloat similar to TV’s other spectacles.About six hours before Celine Dion gutted out the final number of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony, the streaming service Peacock emailed a promo for its coverage with the headline, “We’ll all be crying by the end of this.” So maybe they knew more than they were letting on.The homestretch of the marathon four-hour broadcast, when the celebrating athletes and dance extravaganzas and speeches were out of the way, had some starkly lovely images and moving moments: the speedboat carrying former champions up the Seine in the dark (like a real-life echo of Leos Carax’s great water-skiing scene in “Les Amants du Pont-Neuf”). The grand scale and dramatic lighting of the Louvre as the torch was carried, like a firefly’s flame, through its courtyards. The torch coming to the hand of a 100-year-old French cyclist, steady in his wheelchair, and Dion defying her illness to belt out “Hymne à l’Amour” on the Eiffel Tower.Celine Dion’s performance of “Hymne à l’Amour” provided a triumphant finale.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesBut it took endurance to get there — for the athletes, performers and spectators drenched by the summer rain, and for the viewers at home watching the ceremony as it was conceived by the French organizers and packaged by NBC and Peacock.The decision to abandon the event’s traditional format — the long, formal parade of athletes marching into a stadium — for a waterborne procession along the Seine intercut with performances had a twofold effect. It turned the ceremony into something bigger, more various and more intermittently entertaining. But it also turned it into something more ordinary — just another bloated made-for-TV spectacle, like a halftime show or awards show or holiday parade that exists to promote and perpetuate itself.Those spectacles can be fun, of course, and the traditional Olympics opening ceremony could feel dull and interminable. But it was not quite like anything else, and it played a key part in making the Games feel special.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Why the Olympics’ Parade of Nations Is the Heart of the Opening Ceremony

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      When the athletes march in — or float in, as they will in Paris on Friday — you can enjoy the illusion that it’s a small world after all.Welcome back to the Olympics, and a five-ringed circus of sport and security, national pride and international sponsorship.This summer’s Games officially begin in Paris this Friday, with an uncommon opening ceremony: athletes and acrobats floating along the Seine for as many spectators as the antiterror police will allow. “No other country would have tried this,” crowed President Emmanuel Macron in an interview this week, though the ministers by his side will be from a caretaker government. France is still processing its recent snap legislative election, which nearly brought the far right to power. The ceremony will be all about France’s openness to the world. Not all the local spectators will approve of the message.A rendering of the opening ceremony of the Paris Games. Participants will sail upriver to the Eiffel Tower and the Trocadéro: two landmarks of the capital that were built for 19th-century World’s Fairs.Florian Hulleu/Paris 2024, Agence France-Presse, via Getty ImagesA big modern show, then, after the Covid-shocked, zero-spectator Summer Games in Tokyo. But for all its contemporary soft power — the “Emily in Paris” tie-in, the medals displayed in Louis Vuitton trunks — these Paris Olympics will also be a throwback.The modern Games are a French invention, after all: a projection of Panhellenic manhood onto contemporary Europe by a romantic educator and “fanatical colonialist” (as Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Games, called himself). The opening ceremony, especially, plunges the world’s athletes into the nationalist structures of the late 19th century. The flag-waving of the Olympics, the it’s-a-small-world amusements of the universal exhibition, or the repellent human zoos at colonial fairs: there have been many ways to bring the whole world to Paris.This year’s parade of nations will be on the water. Teams will process through the city center on nearly 100 boats before arriving at the Trocadéro.Florian Hulleu/Paris 2024, Agence France-Presse, via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      When the Paris Olympics Begin, the Seine Is His Stage

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      To open the Games, the theater director Thomas Jolly has masterminded a spectacular waterborne ceremony depicting 12 scenes from French history.In French, the word for stage, “scène,” sounds exactly like the name of the river that runs through Paris.The Seine.That’s one of the first things the director Thomas Jolly liked about the idea of creating an opening ceremony that would float through the heart of Paris.For the past two years, the river has become his workroom, offering challenges unknown to most theater directors: currents and wind tunnels, a vulnerable fish hatchery, a plan for thousands of athletes to float through in boats, 45,000 police officers scattered around for security. Also required: regular check-ins with the French president and Paris mayor.As artistic director of all four Olympic and Paralympic ceremonies, he also has perks most directors could only dream of: a budget of nearly $150 million and more than 15,000 workers, including dancers and musicians. He can also expect a live audience of half a million and 1.5 billion spectators on television.If Jolly pulls it off, this will be the first time an opening ceremony is unfurled outside the secure confines of a stadium. The Seine has not seen such a celebration in 285 years, since King Louis XV celebrated the marriage of his daughter to the prince of Spain.A time-lapse video of a boat rehearsal for the opening Olympic ceremony on the Seine.By Dmitry KostyukovWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      France’s Army Is Singing for Ukraine

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      The Choir of the French Army will join the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra in Paris to show support for Ukraine in its war against Russia.When President Emmanuel Macron of France refused in February to rule out sending Western troops to Ukraine, he shattered a taboo and spooked his NATO allies. But five months later, his statement looks more like a provocation than a promise, and the idea of French boots on the ground seems a distant prospect.There are other ways, however, that France’s military can aid the Ukrainian cause.In a Paris church on Friday, 30 members of the Choir of the French Army will lend their voices to a free concert to honor Ukraine’s fighting spirit.“We are here on a mission,” said the conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson during a recent rehearsal for the concert, “a mission to support Ukraine, on the artistic and cultural front.”Then she led the singers of the all-male military choir, joined by 30 female members of a Ukrainian vocal ensemble, through a rendition of the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the famous “Ode to Joy.” The massed voices soared in the echoing space.At Friday’s concert, Wilson, a Canadian with Ukrainian roots, will conduct the singers alongside the 74-musician Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra in Saint-Eustache church. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the orchestra — some of whose members still live in the country at war — have been coming together each summer to perform across Europe, with Wilson conducting.The concert in Paris is the first stop on the orchestra’s third tour. The ensemble will perform with local choirs when it plays concerts in London, Poland and the United States, where it will perform in Washington and, on Aug. 1, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      ‘Terraces’ Review: A Stunning Tragedy Revisits the Paris Terror Attacks

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      The French writer Laurent Gaudé taps into collective trauma from the Nov. 13, 2015 terrorist outrage and channels it into something like catharsis.Outdoor cafe terraces are part and parcel of the Parisian way of life — ready meeting points for socializing and people-watching, across ages and social classes. Yet the word for them in French also means to floor, or bring down, someone.On Nov. 13, 2015, the worst Islamist terrorist attack in French history did just that to Parisians, bringing horror to cafes and entertainment venues in a string of coordinated shootings and bombings. Now Laurent Gaudé, a prominent French author and playwright, has channeled the collective trauma of that night into a stunning play, “Terraces,” which had its world premiere at the Théâtre National de la Colline in Paris on Wednesday.If you were in the city that night in 2015, fielding panicked calls from relatives and friends as news alerts pinged, the prospect of a show summoning those memories may be cause for trepidation. And “Terraces” does bring it all back — the gut punch, the nausea. Yet Gaudé and the director, Denis Marleau, manage just the right amount of distance and emotional finesse to haunt rather than reopen wounds.It isn’t the first attempt to dramatize the attack. In 2017, a book by Antoine Leiris, whose wife was among the victims, was adapted for the stage, and several short plays have focused on the stories of survivors.With “Terraces,” however, Gaudé works on a much more ambitious scale. Its structure is choral: The text weaves together not just the experience of victims, but the voices of people whose lives changed in other ways that night. Passers-by, spouses, parents, emergency medical workers, special forces and a janitor all make appearances, with stories that overlap and build up to a collective remembrance of the attack.Extensive research evidently went into the production, but “Terraces” doesn’t fit neatly into the genre of documentary theater. Its characters are composite creations rather than real people: Many introduce themselves under several names and stress that theirs are collective stories. While some characters pop up time and again over the course of the play, they often occupy a liminal space between dream and reality, reappearing at the scenes of other shootings or speaking from beyond the grave.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Scientists at The Pasteur Institute in Paris Are Forming Musical Groups

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      The Pasteur Institute in Paris, known for its world-altering scientific research, has been making advancements in another field: the musical arts.The Pasteur Institute, since opening in the 15th Arrondissement in Paris in the late 1880s, has been recognized for world-altering scientific discoveries. The institute, named for Louis Pasteur, the pioneering French scientist who founded it, has contributed to the production of vaccines for tetanus and the flu and was at the forefront of discovering the virus that causes AIDS.In recent years, the Pasteur Institute has made advancements in another field — the musical arts — as some of its scientists have formed bands and other acts involving colleagues as well as students who have studied there. That cohort has honed its musical passion and ability at an on-site studio they call the music lab.On a Friday evening in March, three acts developed in the lab headlined an event held at the institute’s cafeteria. They included Polaris and also Billie and the What?!, both blues-rock bands, and an a cappella group, Les Papillons, or “the butterflies” in English.Some performers in the a cappella group Les Papillons, or “the butterflies” in English, accessorized their outfits with wings. Cedrine Scheidig for The New York TimesGermano Cecere, a director at the institute, center rear on the drums, performed with his band Billie and the What?!Cedrine Scheidig for The New York TimesMoody purple light bathed the room, which was decorated with balloons and streamers in shades of pink, gold and white. It was filled with more than a hundred people, as well as with an array of equipment, including mics, speakers, guitars and an elaborate drum kit.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      In the End, ‘The New Look’ Left Us Wanting More

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      More Dior. More Chanel. More fashion!The last episode of “The New Look,” the Apple TV+ series about Christian Dior, Coco Chanel and the birth of post-World War II fashion, aired on April 4. A fictional take on the choices those designers had to make to survive, the show offered its own new look, not just at the origin story of a dress style, but at the actual characters behind the brands. Here, the Styles editor Stella Bugbee and the fashion critic Vanessa Friedman debate the possible repercussions for the two dominant red carpet names.Vanessa Friedman So my big question, after watching the whole series, is, Will this change how people think about Dior and Chanel? Those brands, after all, bear the names of their founders, and this show is the first time I expect most viewers will have been confronted with the idea of them as real individuals, with many — in the case of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, who is depicted as a Nazi collaborator, even if a somewhat unintentional one, very many — human frailties. What do you think?Stella Bugbee It has the potential to personalize these megabrands — for better or worse, since the show is riddled with factual inaccuracies. While pointing to Mademoiselle Chanel’s Nazi past, the show paints her choices as something almost verging on feminism. It’s a tidy bit of propaganda in a way. And as for Monsieur Dior, it takes pains to paint him as a success almost despite himself.But the best way it humanizes these characters is through the compelling performances of Ben Mendelsohn and Juliette Binoche. I was rooting for both of them. And I found that I wanted to know more about each brand, so that seems like a win.Ben Mendelsohn as Christian Dior and Maisie Williams as his sister, Catherine, who was in the French resistance during World War II. AppleTV+VF Dior comes off as the hero of the series, while Chanel is the villain, even if, as you say, she has a feminist bent, especially when she is confronting the Wertheimers, her backers, about getting a more even split of the proceeds. They ask her how she could use their Jewishness against them, and she asks them if they have ever considered what it is to be a single woman running her own business (a complicated equivalency).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More