Out of the Ground Comes Light - Dianne Hofmeyr

We all saw it… the power of storytelling. 


Who will forget the London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony with children being wheeled in on brightly lit hospital beds, winged bikes flying through the air reminding us of the magic of riding our first bicycle, floating trees, the chimney stacks rising from the ground, the Child Catcher and Voldemort versus Mary Poppins, Evelyn Glennie’s wild drumming, the Queen arriving with James Bond, J K Rowling reading an excerpt from Peter Pan, Kenneth Branagh as the engineer Brunel, speaking Caliban’s famous lines from The Tempest…  the explosion of story telling… the moments of glorious insanity, the pandemonium, the sense of celebration?

  

And as writers we have reason to celebrate when the scriptwriter for the ceremony was none other than 2004 Carnegie Medal winner for his debut, Millions, based on his own screenplay for the film of the same name whose novel, Framed, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Book of the Year as well as the Carnegie Medal and his 2009 novel Cosmic was also shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal… and who in 2011 was commissioned to write a sequel to the Ian Fleming children's book Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which was published in October 2011 as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again –  Frank Cottrell Boyce (I wrote about him in a previous post when he was guest speaker at our CWIG Conference last year)

He says he stayed eerily calm watching the event with his wife and two of his seven children. Its clear that for the planning, he and Danny Boyle and the other designers shared things they loved about Britain – the Industrial Revolution, the digital revolution, the NHS, pop music, children's literature and genius engineers. He bought Danny a copy of Humphrey Jennings's astonishing book, Pandemonium and the show's opening section ended up being named Pandemonium. He added a few very personal touches to the evening, like using the motto of his old school, St Helens: Ex Terra Lucem – out of the ground comes light, for the idea of the Cauldron.

He is quoted as saying: ‘For me the evening was like a work of art – it’s complex like a great poem or painting and as a result people can take different things from it and react in different ways.’

Someone else said of the evening. ‘It was enchanted. And it belongs to all of us. We are secure enough in our traditions to play around with them.’ 


Yes it was brave... very brave... creative and wonderful... story telling at its best. And the magic of it is probably rightfully summed up by Caliban's lines from The Tempest:

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.

www.diannehofmeyr.com