More than 20 top French DJs are set to feature at the closing ceremony of the Paris Paralympics on Sunday that will give pride of place to electronic music.
The line up at the national stadium in Paris on Sunday evening features “French touch” legends Cassius and Kavinsky alongside globe-trotting electro star Martin Solveig and more recent dancefloor favourites Ofenbach.
“You can imagine it like the biggest nightclub in France,” Paris 2024 ceremony artistic director Thomas Jolly told reporters on Friday in Paris.
The hour-long set, which will see 24 DJs mix in one track each on stage, will be opened and closed by French electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre, 76.
“He’s our father, our boss,” DJ Agoria told reporters in Paris. “I’m happy he’ll be a sort of orchestra conductor.”
France is a global powerhouse of the dance music scene, but Sunday’s show will not quite be the creme de la creme of the country’s stable of performers.
There is no scheduled role for Daft Punk, or veterans Laurent Garnier and Bob Sinclair, while Jolly has had a public spat with David Guetta who voiced his frustration at not being invited to play the Olympics opening ceremony on July 26.
That ceremony later became embroiled in a row over whether Jolly had sought to parody a famous depiction of Jesus’ Last Supper with a dance routine scene involving drag queens and an LGBTQ+ activist DJ.
“There was never any intention or inspiration in me to mock Christianity,” the theatre director, 42, stressed. “There is no controversy.”
Sunday’s closing ceremony at the end of the Paris Paralympics will again seek to push artistic boundaries, with part of the music show set to celebrate the drug-fuelled rave scene and culture of the 1980s and 90s.
It will also see the Olympic cauldron extinguished and a symbolic handover from Paris to Los Angeles, which will host the next Games in 2028.
The Paris Olympiad has been widely hailed as a triumph of organisation and design, with the French capital adopting a new model of holding much of the sport in temporary stadia at the heart of the historic city.
Chief organiser Tony Estanguet said Sunday’s ceremony would be a celebration of the sportsmen and women who have lit up the Games over the last six weeks.
“The idea is to finish with a huge party that will prevent the tears of those who might be saying to themselves ‘damn it, it’s all finished’,” he said. “No, we’re going to have a party and then on Monday maybe we’ll be disappointed because it really will be all over.”
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