PARIS: Paris Olympics organisers said on Sunday they were “really sorry” if any offence was caused by their daring and quirky opening ceremony while denying any intention to “disrespect” religion after complaints from French bishops.

Some Catholic groups and French bishops have condemned what they saw as “scenes of derision and mockery of Christianity” in the parade on Friday choreographed by theatre director Thomas Jolly.

Criticism has focused on a scene involving dancers, drag queens and a DJ in poses that recalled depictions of the Last Supper, the final meal Jesus is said to have taken with his apostles.

“Clearly there was never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group,” Paris 2024 spokeswoman Anne Descamps told reporters on Sunday. “If people have taken any offence, we are of course really, really sorry,” she added.

Jolly, 42, denied taking inspiration from the Last Supper in his nearly four-hour production, which took place in driving rain along the River Seine.

The scene, intended to promote tolerance of different sexual and gender identities, also featured French actor Philippe Katerine, who appeared on a silver serving dish, almost naked and painted blue.

He was meant to be Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and pleasure, who was the father of Sequana, the goddess of the River Seine.

“The idea was to do a big pagan party linked to the gods of Olympus,” Jolly told the BFM channel on Sunday. “You’ll never find in my work any desire to mock or denigrate anyone. I wanted a ceremony that brings people together, that reconciles, but also a ceremony that affirms our Republican values of liberty, equality and fraternity,” he added.

In one of the other striking moments of the ceremony, a woman holding a bloodied severed head and intended to be executed French queen Marie-Antoinette appeared in a window of the Conciergerie, a building where she was imprisoned after the 1789 French Revolution.

She was later guillotined along with her husband Louis XVI.

“Certainly we were not glorifying this instrument of death which is the guillotine,” Jolly added.

Reactions were mixed towards the unprecedented ceremony, the first time a Summer Olympics has opened outside of the main athletics stadium.

A poll by the survey group Harris, which was commissioned by Paris 2024 organisers, showed that 86 per cent of respondents in France held positive views on the ceremony.

Quebec-born singer Celine Dion, who brought the curtain down with a solo performance from the Eiffel Tower, emerged as the most notable feature of the parade when respondents were asked what they remembered.

French President Emmanuel Macron said on Saturday that the ceremony had “made our compatriots extremely proud”.

But the racially diverse cast of performers and the prominence given to women and LGBT+ performers upset some conservative critics, who dismissed it as “woke”.

A spokesman for France’s far-right National Rally party, Julien Odoul, called the ceremony “a ransacking of French culture”, while Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called it a “giant gay parade”.

American broadcaster NBC said the procession was the most-watched start to an Olympics since London in 2012, while German broadcaster ARD reported it being the most watched in 20 years, according to International Olympic Committee spokesman Mark Adams.

Around 300,000 spectators watched from the river banks, often at a cost of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of euros.

Published in Dawn, July 29th, 2024