Brazil brings it’s samba style to the opening ceremony of the Rio Olympics 2016

Rio de Janeiro, Aug 6 : 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 has been suspended and is awaiting an impeachment trial that could occur during the Games. The country is 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.