RIO DE JANEIRO - The Summer Olympic Games kicked off Friday night in an opening ceremony with a gutted budget but a soaring feel, as a stadium nestled here below a hillside pulsed with lights, fireworks, circus-like acrobats and a samba singalong typical of this nation’s partying style.
Brazil, the first South American country to host the Olympics, used the start of the Games to tell a version of the country’s history - from slavery to mega-cities - that comes as hard economic times are testing its fun-loving style.
The celebration at Maracanã stadium featured a 12-year-old rapper, a supermodel, and beams of light used to dazzling effect - part of what Daniela Thomas, one of the event’s co-directors, called “MacGyver” ingenuity, in reference to the stripped-down budget.
This was a tricky task, throwing a party at a grim time. Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, has been suspended and is awaiting an impeachment trial that could occur during the Games. When acting president Michel Temer spoke at the end of the ceremony, his words were quickly drowned out with boos.
The country is also suffering its worst recession in decades. Paychecks have been delayed for some civil servants in recent months. Call it the Austerity Olympics - except in one way. Even in a country without a history of extremist attacks, 88,000 soldiers and are patrolling Rio, twice the number used in London four years ago.
The opening ceremony sought to pump the brakes on the high-tech one-upsmanship that has come to define the opening ceremonies of Olympic Games from Beijing to London to Sochi. The Brazilians went for organic and authentic, looking to nature and their own cool style. Their show didn’t rely on expensive mechanical audacities; they resorted to what the program described as “analogue inventiveness.”
This played to the nation’s strengths. Brazil has natural beauty in reserve: the world’s largest rainforest in the Amazon, the white sands of Copacabana. Rio de Janeiro is a city whose residents love to be outside: from the girls who skateboard down the Ipanema coast to the men sharing icy beers on plastic sidewalk tables. The city does not walk, it cruises,a backbeat floating in the warm air, needing nothing but shorts and flip-flops.
As the ceremony kicked off, projections of light and imagery cast the stadium floor in ethereal greens and blues, as in a span of minutes providing eons of choreographed history. Images on the turf first showed a creation-of-Earth story – molecules, smoke, creatures crawling from the sea. Soon, a new splash of light gave the stadium the feel of a rain forest, with the sounds of animals chirping to make the point. The analogue part? Massive Erector Set-like insects, attached to the shoulders of performers, shuffled across the stadium.
Then, history zoomed forward, and the stadium was a dance through the national timeline. A line of indigenous tribes carving out homes in the rain forest. Portuguese arriving on ships in the colonial era. Africans towed to shore, shackled, moving through the stadium with feet secured in blocks. Then, the music quickened, and projections showed what appeared to be blocks rising from the ground. As those blocks turned into skyscrapers - an homage to Rio’s development – a team of dancers leapt from rooftop to rooftop, in what resembled an action movie chase scene.
Earlier, the Brazilian singer Regina Casé, who warmed up the crowd at Maracanã stadium, told the thousands of cheering spectators what they wanted to hear: “Here in Brazil, we like to party.”
Over 400 years before it became the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery in 1888, Brazil imported about 5 million African slaves, 10 times more than the United States. The opening ceremony at the 1996 Summer Games, which were held in Atlanta, did not include any reference to slavery, angering some groups.
Brazil showed off some of its musical riches, with a much-loved samba singer, Zeca Pagodinho. The audience sang along. This was following by a dance routine featuring dancers spinning on the floor, which was based on capoeira, a Brazilian martial art, and was accompanied by Brazilian female rapper Karol Conka.
The athletes who paraded into the stadium, pumping fists and holding smartphones, represented 206 nations and almost as many colors and styles. Athletes from Cameroon wore traditional flowing robes, those from communist-led Cuba had outfits designed by a French luxury footwear designer; those from Australia wore seersuckers and shorts, as if preparing for an afternoon of yachting.
Introductions moved alphabetically, but in Portguese, and so the United States - Esados Unidos - was bumped up from its usual spot in the back of the line. The 554-member team, the largest in the Games, received an enthusiastic welcome as Secretary of State John Kerry looked on from the stands. Legendary swimmer Michael Phelps, already with 22 Olympic medals, held the flag.
The athletes from the other nations included the decorated and the obscure, Afghanistan, with three athletes, was led by Kamia Yousufi, 20, competing in the 100-meter dash. Meantime, tennis star Andy Murray fronted the team for Great Britain; his rival on the pro tour, Rafael Nadal, carried the flag for Spain. The Russian team emerged with its ranks diminished, thinned by a massive doping scandal.
Each team was ushered onto the stadium floor by a Technicolor bicycle.
One of the biggest roars of the night came for a 10-member team of refugees, a group competing for the first time in the Olympics and the penultimate squad to be introduced. That roar only amplified when the final team emerged - the Brazilians.
Many people had expected the Olympic flame to be lit by 75-year-old soccer legend Pelé, but he said that he would not participate in the ceremony because of his health.
For the opening ceremony, the budget available for Meirelles, who directed the Oscar-nominated film “City of God,” was one-tenth of what British director Danny Boyle had for the 2012 Summer Olympics ceremony in London. In an interview on the 2016 Rio Olympics website, Meirelles talked about how his ambitions were forced to shrink along with the vanishing budget. What began as more than $100 million was cut in half, a show of 3,000 people sliced to 700.
“At first I was very upset. You start thinking something very big and then you have to cut, cut, cut,” he added. “On the other hand, it is good in some way because we are in a moment in the world where we need to be reasonable with the way we spend money.”
That scaled down ambitions fit well with the frustrated mood across many parts of Rio.
Rio’s preparations for the Games were marked by a catalogue of bad news: sluggish venue construction,rising crime and coastal waters so polluted that Olympic swimmers were advised to avoid swallowing even a few spoonfuls.
The run-up to the games has been punctuated by demonstrations, an anti-Olympic backlash driven by people who felt the time was not right for lavish spending. Protesters blocked the torch’s progress as it made its way around the country and attempted to douse it with fire extinguishers and buckets of water; in a few cases they were met by police firing tear gas and rubber bullets.
Just hours before the opening ceremony, security forces fired tear gas and a percussion grenade after youths set fire to a Brazilian flag and a Rio 2016 volunteer’s T-shirt and tried to get close to the Maracanã stadium. One man was arrested.
The trouble came after a march targeting what demonstrators called “the Exclusion Games” had come to a peaceful end in at the leafy Afonso Pena square near the stadium. Beatriz Nunes, 34, a teacher at the march, said that when some protesters tried to cross a police line, officers responded with tear gas and the percussion grenade.
Earlier in the day, a few thousand protestors marched along the Copacabana seafront in a sea of red shirts. They took aim at two targets - Temer, who took over in May when Rousseff was suspended and ordered to face a controversial impeachment trial, and the Olympic Games themselves.
“We don’t have the conditions to receive the Games,” said Leonardo Ladeira, a 22-year-old protestor. “At this moment it is a chaotic activity.”
Harlan reported from Washington. The Washington Post’s Dom Phillips, Adam Kilgore and Rick Maese in Rio de Janeiro contributed to this report.
