The Opening Ceremony is tomorrow
'oe also revealed details of the Paralympics opening ceremony, after the first full dress rehearsal on Sunday night. The rehearsal was brought forward by 24 hours due to fears about heavy rain. Organisers hope the three-hour ceremony will not be affected by adverse weather.
The ceremony, directed by Jenny Sealey and Bradley Hemmings, will feature more than 3,000 volunteers including 50 disabled performers who have been learning circus skills from scratch. The athletes will come in earlier than during the Olympics opening ceremony, sitting on the track to form part of the audience.
Coe said the show, titled Enlightenment, was more thoughtful than the action-packed opening hour of Danny Boyle's rapturously received Isles of Wonder extravaganza. "I really like it. It focuses on that extraordinary period in European history and the great intellectual revolution that took place between 1550 and 1720. Everything from Newton making sense of gravity and motion to Napier with logarithms and Harvey with blood circulation.
"It's really about ceilings, about human understanding, about limitations and the importance of knowledge. Within that period some quite profound things were being said about the rights of man. You can probably gather what it's trying to say."
The same Thomas Heatherwick-designed cauldron used during the Olympics will be used for the Paralympics, but only 166 of its 205 "petals" will be inscribed, reflecting the smaller number of competing countries.'
Should be worth a watch
