http://www.london-tours-2012.com/
An A-list roster from across the arts world, including Mike Leigh, Toni Morrison, Damon Albarn, Cate Blanchett, Rachel Whiteread and Jude Law, will take part in what was today billed as an "extraordinary, once in a lifetime" series of events to coincide with the London Olympics. More than three million people are expected to attend the Cultural Olympiad's London 2012 festival, which if successful, will represent a spectacular turnaround for a project which has been widely derided as a potential flop. David Hockney, asked if he'd like to send a message of support, emailed an artwork from his iPad which included the text "See you in 2012". His Olympics contribution will be a major exhibition at the Royal Academy during the 12-week festival, which will begin in June 2010 – about two months before the sport starts – and run until the end of the Paralympics, which follow the main Games.
Announcing some of the works already commissioned, Cultural Olympiad director Ruth Mackenzie, said: "This is just a small, small taster. We are still 18 months away and we want to hold our fire for when we actually start selling tickets in October 2011. But we are going to tease." So the launch at the Royal Opera House included headlines rather than details. In the visual arts, Rachel Whiteread will be doing "something" in east London, while Martin Creed will be creating a new sound piece, and Olafur Eliasson will be creating an unspecified work. The Nobel-prize winning novelist Toni Morrison is collaborating with the Malian singer Rokia Traoré and the director Peter Sellars on a Desdemona inspired work, while Damon Albarn and his Gorillaz partner Jamie Hewlett will create something new with theatre director Rufus Norris. Regular collaborators, director Deborah Warner and actor Fiona Shaw, will create what is described as "an extraordinary coastal installation".
Ironically, one of the most detailed project synopses came from an artist famous for giving precious little away. Mike Leigh has been co-commissioned by BBC Films and Film4 – normally rivals – to make a short film which will, according to the publicity, be "an Olympic reflection on athletics in general and running in particular, as well as aerobics, karate, football, swimming and Pilates, not to mention taxis and secondhand cars." The accompanying photograph of the Mile End Road in east London may be something of a give away to its setting. Not everyone will have noticed, but the Cultural Olympiad, which has £83m at its disposal, has been going on, with a series of events around the country, since the Beijing games ended in 2008. It was criticised as too uncoordinated and directionless – 'we don't know who's running it' was the complaint among arts leaders – until the arrival of first Tony Hall as chairman a year ago, and then the experienced arts manager Mackenzie as director.
They soon decided that the Cultural Olympiad needed a big bang finale as its main event, hence the 12-week festival in the runup to the Olympics. Mackenzie said they wanted to create an "extraordinary, once in a lifetime" series of 1,000 events that had excellence at their core. The festival is UK-wide; so choreographer Akram Khan will work with post-graduates from the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds; the composer James MacMillan will produce a new work to commemorate the anniversary of Coventry Cathedral, 60 years after Benjamin Britten marked its opening with War Requiem; and the film writer Mark Cousins will present a 12-hour history of innovation in cinema that will be screened across the UK.
The festival kicks off at the Ebrington Barracks in Derry with an event devised by the Peace One Day charity which promotes the idea of having one day, 21 September, which is free from conflict – a global day of truce. Jude Law, an ambassador for the charity, will co-produce the event.There will be a lot of Shakespeare in 2012 but full details of the World Shakespeare Festival, co-ordinated by the Royal Shakespeare Company, will be announced next year. A few Bard scraps were though revealed including the fact that the RSC will present plays around the theme of 'What country, friends, is this?' – from Twelfth Night – and there will be specific commissions of Romeo and Juliet from the Iraqi Theatre Company in Baghdad with the Montagues and Capulets being Sunni and Shia; a Richard III inspired spectacle from Rio de Janeiro's Companhia Bufomecanica; and a reimagined Coriolanus from Mike Pearson and the National Theatre of Wales.
The big question was whether the organisers of the Cultural Olympiad would return to the custom of the earliest games and treat the arts as a competitive event, perhaps even awarding their own gold medals. Instead, they've opted for the more conventional model of a festival. The organisers have chosen a risky slow-striptease strategy, in which they dangled a few names yesterday – Mike Leigh, David Hockney, Toni Morrison, Cate Blanchett – while warning that these are only a fraction of the eventual commissions. This is potentially a clever approach – because pundits can be told that the best will be in the rest – but, with tickets not even going on sale until next October, it risks encouraging anticipation fatigue. But the biggest danger for the Cultural Olympiad's director, Ruth McKenzieRuth Mackenzie, on the basis of the repertoire sketched out today, is that she will be accused of turning Britain into a vast Barbican centre.
The events about which she became most excited at the press conference – the UK premiere of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's experimental epic, Einstein on the Beach, and a rare chance to see here a play by the German dramatist Botho Strauss – are all niche theatrical events of a sort familiar from the London International Festival of Theatre: the artistic equivalent of the small-bore shooting rather than the 100 metres. Beyond theatre, there are creators with broader appeal: Olafur Eliasson, after attracting two million people to the Tate with his fake sun, deserves another big stage, and dancer Akram Khan, whose choreography appropriately combines aesthetics and athleticism, is another good fit for this gig. The overall theme of "truce" – including a Peace One Day concert in Derry – is potentially problematic, given that the failure of Osama bin Laden and his followers to sign up means that the games will take place amid one of the biggest security operations in history.
Many will be sceptical about why a sporting event needs an artistic sister – the Ashes and the FIFA World Cup manage without – and, if Mackenzie and her team are going to make the case for spending £83m on supplementary culture, they must find at least some events which match the mainstream, feelgood appeal of the topline sports.
Spyns is an active travel company based in Whistler, BC (Canada). For more information about Spyns and our tours to the 2012 London Summer Olympics, please visit our websites http://www.london2012-tours.com/ and http://www.london-tours-2012.com/ or call us toll-free at 1.888.825.4720.
