It was a spectacular show - not reality TV

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By Ravi S. Narasimhan (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-08-15 08:19

I'll let you into a little Bollywood secret: In all those song-and-dance sequences which are de rigeur in any film - the pair on screen never sing.

Playback singers - the norm in all Indian films - do the singing; the actors just mime.

A singularly-gifted Indian, now nudging 80, has sung herself into the Guinness Book of World Records for the most number of film songs over a career spanning almost all her life - and has been the singing voice of scores of leading ladies.

No wonder I find the "controversy" over the miming by a nine-year-old at the Opening Ceremony of the Games a little perplexing.

Lin Miaoke, the Chinese girl who performed as fireworks blazed (more of that later) apparently mimed Ode to the Motherland and has been described as one of the evening's most indelible images.

It turns out that another girl, a seven-year-old, did the singing.

This is where the tale got twisted in the telling. It is not that Yang Peiyi was not allowed to sing because she was "not pretty enough". It is because Lin's voice was considered "not pretty enough" that she mimed to Yang's singing.

Perfect sense in Bollywood.

Maybe Zhang Yimou, the acclaimed film director who was in charge of the Opening Ceremony, is a fan of Indian films: There are those who sing, and those who mime. Both are stars.

Almost every one of my Chinese colleagues over 40 can readily sing to the tune of Aawara hoon. Many don't know that a playback singer was involved - and Raj Kapoor (Lajie Kapu'er) was just miming.

Not that the phenomenon is limited to Bollywood. There have been several instances of US pop singers lip-synching in concerts; but more famously, at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, the legendary tenor Luciano Pavarotti, then 71, lip-synched an aria - a concession to his age and the cold weather, the New York Times reported when it ran Lin's story.

The conductor, Leone Magiera, reveals in a book that the rousing rendition of Nessun Dorma (Let No One Sleep) was pre-recorded because "it would have been too dangerous for him to give a live performance in that physical condition". Pavarotti died in September last year at 71.

"The orchestra pretended to play for the public there, I pretended to conduct and Luciano pretended to sing," Magiera writes.

"It came off beautifully, no one was aware of the technical tricks."

Yes, there is a difference between lip-synching and miming but clearly, what's sauce for Pavarotti is not the same dressing for Zhang.

Then there is that fuss about the spectacular fireworks - of which organizers said some were pre-recorded.

"Some footage had been produced before the Opening Ceremony to provide theatrical effect," Reuters quoted a senior Games official as telling reporters.

Among the sections that were pre-produced were parts of a stunning fireworks display across the city, a series of fireworks "footprints" that led to the Bird's Nest where the four-hour extravaganza was staged, the news agency said.

Zhang is a movie maestro who has given us films like Hero - (among his wuxia dramas) - and we willingly suspended disbelief when the flying Tony Leung and Jet Li fought dazzling battles.

Zhang's brief would surely have been to put on the most dazzling show ever seen at a Games opening ceremony.

Everyone acknowledges he did - the ceremony won gushing praise from around the world and was watched by an estimated 2 billion people. So what if some of the fireworks did not actually go off that night?

It was a Zhang Yimou tour de force and a crowning moment which had everyone wondering what London - the next Olympic host in 2012 - could do to top it.

I have a couple of suggestions:

Unleash Mr Bean. He can mime his way through the opening ceremony.

Or seek inspiration from Bollywood.

E-mail: ravi@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 08/15/2008 page10)