Should you ever find yourself heading to your first audition may I suggest not washing your trainers the night before and leaving them out to dry? They don’t dry so quick.
One Sunday morning in November 2011, eight months before the start of the London 2012 Olympic Games, I find myself squelching along the odious back streets of east London. I’m heading to an audition that will hopefully result in me taking part in one of the ceremonies that will bookend the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Since July 2005, when London had won the right to stage the iconic global sporting event, I’d subscribed to any and every email to do with my hometown Games. When an email pings through calling for volunteers to audition for ceremony parts, I’m on it like a rash.
Cursing the loss of my recently dispatched Fame-inspired leg warmers in a declutter-your-life-inspired frenzy, I dress in tracky bums, artfully distressed Atlanta 1996 Olympics motifed T-shirt and the aforementioned damp trainers.
The auditions of nigh on 10,000 people are set to take place at 3 Mills Studios, ‘London’s largest film and television production studios’, and a mere five miles from where I live.
The capital offers its very best in convoluted ways to get to my nearby destination. Ongoing Tube works? Tick. Car park facilities at the venue unavailable to auditionees? Tick. Fourteen different buses to get there? Tick.
So, on this drizzly grey morning, my boyfriend Jason drops me off as near as he can to the venue, ready for my 9am start. I still have to make my way through a graffiti-daubed tunnel, past a rotting mattress and through a gas leak haze, but then voilà, I’m there.
Sizing up
Clutching my passport, I join a line that snakes around a warehouse-style building and get chatting to those around me. A middle-aged artist nervous and flighty as a bird: “Am I wearing the right shoes? The wrong shoes? What do you think? I’m going to change them. No, I’ll keep these on. Can you hold these, please?”
I bond with a woman even more petite than my 5ft 2ins and we fill the waiting time discussing potential costumes. Perhaps we’ll be a mushroom or a flower we ponder, our lack of performance experience clear in our primary school drama-inspired musings.
Once inside and through security photos are taken for our passes ‘in case we get through’. Even at this early stage we’re also measured for costumes.
I’m intrigued by my measurement of seven inches for my hands and amused by one figure in the next numbers.
“32ins.”
Yep, knew that.
“24ins.”
Get me with my little waist.
“38ins.”
What? My butt is 38 inches. Are you kidding me? I won’t need those butt implant thingies, then.
Once inside, the guy who has had the masochistic ‘pleasure’ of organising the ceremonies for the past four Olympic Games addresses us. Trying to get a handle on the sort of volunteers he has in front of him he asks various questions as we excitedly gather around him.
Have any of us gone to any previous Olympics, he asks, and if so, what memories do we have? Usually one to spout my sport superfan credentials at any opportunity I find myself tongue-tied. I can only think of being robbed on the train on the way to the stadium at the Athens Olympics, which seems a tad negative, so I keep silent in case a cross is marked against my name.
One fella has flown in from Philadelphia for the audition, trumping everyone with his enthusiasm. The director of operations points out the American’s thin, well-worn T-shirt. “Yes, it’s from the 1996 Atlanta Olympics,” the man explains proudly. “I was a volunteer there, too.”
I cross my arms over my own Atlanta 1996 motifed top, as I clearly can’t compete with this man’s devotion. My trendily distressed top was bought the previous week from Next.
Marching to a different drum
The next three hours can only be described as a ‘drill’. We walk, march and jog along lines taped to the floor, school-gym stylee. Music pumps out beats and clipboard-laden staff mingle among us, scratching down notes after peering at the number pinned to our clothes.
We’re separated into big groups, small groups, directed to one side of the area, to the back wall, nothing complicated, just following instructions. I’m a former gymnast so very much used to being coached and I do everything exactly as asked. Except one thing.
At one point we’re told to stay in line, to follow the markings on the floor but “do your own thing”. I act on this with gusto, dancing up a storm to the music, but within this melee I don’t hear the next instruction, something that has consequences in what happens at the next audition. That’s right, I said next audition, I make it through the first hurdle.
Out of step
“You have been selected,” says the head honcho of the ceremonies cast, “because you all did your own thing during the first audition. You’re now all auditioning for the main dance in the Olympic Games opening ceremony.”
Gulp.
The reason I’ve been chatting to professional dancers all morning suddenly becomes all too clear. I am in over my head.
Not only that but the previous day I’d had a cortisone pain-killing injection in my spine due to an old gymnastics injury so this is me ‘resting’ after the procedure.
We stand in a grid formation and I’m next to a guy with three giant purple spikes jutting out of his black slicked-down hair. A professional dancer (natch) he’s just arrived having danced on a nightclub podium until dawn.
Yours truly, meanwhile, had an early night, fuelled up on energy-giving carbs for dinner, and has bananas in her bag, plus plenty of liquid to keep hydrated throughout the day. As we stand on our grid positions, the instructor points out my spiky-haired friend.
“You with the hair. You’re a good point of reference for everyone else. When we ask you to get back to your grid positions you’d better make sure you know where your position is. I want you to be the marker for everyone else.”
This makes my life easier, I think. Turns out, finding my grid position is the only thing that’s easy that day. We start off with a few steps. Bam, bam, turn, turn, boom diddy boom and cha. And again. “Feel free to add your own interpretation,” we’re told.
“Okay, let’s move on and add some more steps. Da da daaaa, step step, twist, step, dum dum. Let’s go. Great. Right, let’s add the two together. Perfect. Okay, and next section…”
And so it goes on, with more mini steps added to the previous sections. I start well but get increasingly confused the more moves are added to the routine. It’s possible this is where being a professional dancer is an advantage.
A few hours in and I’m forgetting how the dance even starts but decide to brazen it out, grinning inanely and adding personal touches to my incorrect steps. Those audition stalwarts around me execute the routines flawlessly adding their own flourishes for extra oomph.
By the end of the audition I feel deflated, I’m so clearly out of my depth I must have blown my opportunity. I had enjoyed my Flashdance-plus-200-people moment but I’m gutted but not entirely surprised when a few days later I receive an email saying, ‘Thank you for your time but at this point you’re a reserve’.
Friends and family say I’ve done well to get this far. I nod but I’m never going to be satisfied with that.
Never, ever give up
In May 2012, two months before the Games begin I’m still just a reserve – I have to do something.
My feverish desire to be part of the London Olympics stems from a career-curtailing back injury, suffered during my teens, from my beloved gymnastics. London, therefore, is my Olympics, the Games I never made.
Like many fans, I’ve applied for a gazillion tickets via a ballot system and also been interviewed for a Games Maker role – basically a volunteer – yet so far I’ve ended up with nothing. So I do what anyone would do. I write casting a poem. Along the lines of ‘I live down the road, in the Olympic post code’ I use the term ‘poem’ loosely.
A plea to whoever receives this ode
From a reserve left by the side of the road
Please know that I am here
Waiting for the all clear
I even live in the Olympic postcode.
The opening ceremony is what I await
My schedule is a clean slate
Two auditions I did complete
Tip tapping my dancing feet
But now I await my Olympic fate.
So to you I do ask
Let me help with your task
To welcome the world to our host nation
Going above and beyond expectation
To help inspire a generation.
Two days later I receive a phone call from casting.
“We love your poem,” they say.
“It was rubbish,” I blush.
“You’re in,” they conclude.
“Waaaaaaaaaarrrgggggghhhhhh,” say I.
My own rhapsody
Most cast members have been rehearsing for up to 10 hours a day for the previous six months at this stage but my late entry, along with nine other lucky souls, comes about because of opening ceremony head honcho Danny Boyle.
The London-based director, known for films such as Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting, wants to emulate the hologram effect in Queen’s music video for Bohemian Rhapsody.
During a 1970s dance sequence our catsuit-clad group of 10, ‘The Reverbs’ are positioned in five pairs on each point of a star-shaped troupe. One of the pair wears a ‘backpack’ with a number of glittery human-shaped cut outs strung together, descending from life-sized to smaller and smaller figures. The partner, positioned behind, uses a pole to hook the first, drawing out the people paper-chain effect, therefore creating the 3D illusion as per the video. Got it? Good.
Oh Danny boy
In only our second day of involvement, us late arrivals find ourselves in the first rehearsal to take place in the London Olympic stadium, therefore avoiding the rather less glamorous car park in Dagenham where the majority of the cast have been based until then.
Lighting technicians and sound guys are beetling away in the rafters while down below, us 5,000 volunteers are guided around the arena and walked through our positions. Towards the end of the night it begins to rain and we’re told we can leave slightly earlier than our stated 10pm finish.
My small team are the only ones on stage when suddenly the lights are switched on for the first time; shortly afterwards, music booms from the speakers, vibrating through my very being. I turn my face up to the rain and begin to dance.
Noticing an anorak-clad dancer across the other side of the stage we shimmy towards each other. “This is awesome,” I yell, still jigging away. “I know,” says the boogying hooded figure looking up; it’s Danny Boyle.
The Oscar-winning film director who has been charged with overseeing the opening ceremony endears himself to every one of the cast and crew. Applauding all us volunteers as we leave rehearsals, appreciative of the time we’ve given to be shaped into some sort of cohesive performers – many of us never having attempted anything like this before – his sheer joy at the whole process, despite the mounting pressure, is infectious.
During rehearsal a hashtag is displayed on screens around the venue imploring ‘#keepthesecret’. And we all do, in no small part down to our loyalty to Boyle. I even keep the secret despite working at a newspaper at the time and when phoning in to a radio station to rail against the negativity swamping the Games.
Oh, what a night
The cast head to the holding camp – basically a giant marquee at the east end of the Olympic park – during the early afternoon ahead of our nighttime performance.
Squealing punks are taking photos of NHS nurses who in turn are hugging industrial revolution workers. Half-eaten packed lunches are nibbled on, coat hangers are swinging on rails from recently grabbed costumes, people loll on the grass doing each other’s make-up – just bedlam – wonderful, thrilling, buzzing, anticipatory bedlam.
Our holding station is a 30-minute walk from the stadium so timing is crucial. Tannoy announcements indicate when it’s each sector’s time to go. Us ‘reverbs’ are part of the ‘Thanks Tim’ cast – no one had a clue who this Tim fella was until watching the show back the next day – the main dance sequence going through Britain’s musical decades of the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and noughties.
We are almost last to go on stage before the athlete parade begins, so we set off giggling, fully costumed up in full-on Lycra catsuits with additional arm and foot ‘wings’, crossing over a footbridge and waving to the astonished drivers below.
On the night I look skyward from my holding position at the stadium, gobsmacked to see a man in a tuxedo and a lady in a dress dropping from the sky. Amusingly, the cast are the last people to know it’s the ‘Queen’ leaping out of the helicopter alongside ‘James Bond’, making their grand entrance into the stadium. During rehearsals we’d seen the helicopter and parachutists but presumed it was a security thing.
We wait in Vom Three, a gross-sounding name for one of five long tentacles that stretch through the bowels of the building and into different entrances around the stadium. We’ve heard the music so many times during rehearsals we know exactly at which point we’re to enter. From our holding position we see glimmers of sparkle coming from the stage, lights dancing, punks leaping, music booming. I can’t wait to get out there.
We wear earpieces with transmitters but as usual, mine falls out early on, so I just scamper onto the stage without paying too much mind to, you know, hearing the instructions from the stage manager.
The seats in the stadium are close to the track, tapering into the darkness beyond, making the stadium feel almost cosy, like a front room. I’m just able to see the people in the first few rows.
I jig onto the stage, dance a little, dash off, remove my ‘reverb backpack’, run 200m round the track to the point where I pick up a lit flare, running further round the track while thrusting said flare in the air all the while avoiding setting my lacquered hair on fire; after putting the now dud flare in a bucket of water off stage I head back out into the throng with arms waving in the air like reeds singing, ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’, ‘dance’ up a steep ramp, dash through the ‘house’ on stage past internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee, out the back of the house and on to the Tor for some final dancing and then – boom, hands held aloft, the music stops and the lights blaze.
It was only then I realise, truly, how many people are in the stadium. A beat of silence and then an almighty roar erupts. Blinking rapidly, I never want the moment to end.
Night fever
We’ve been told to vacate the stadium and the park immediately after our performance so that we don’t add to the footfall of people leaving the area. But, well, we are just about the last ones to perform and as we dash out of the stadium all the athletes are coming in. Two of us try to blend in with the throng of fans and army personnel lining the route – in our catsuits – and proceed to cheer every single athlete into the stadium.
“Tom Daley, Tom – do you like my catsuit? I’ve just been in the opening ceremony.”
“Good luck Usain!”
Athletes are swapping pin badges with each other, fans and the military – it’s wonderful.
After the last athletes have gone we traipse back towards the holding station. We’re scooped up by security guards in a buggy telling us we have to move quickly as the fireworks will be going off all around the park shortly. Loafing about in a firework zone in flammable material is presumably unwise.
So we’re dropped near the changing area where half a dozen of us sit on a small grassy hill and watch the fireworks bookend the night, me, the only one still in my costume.
Part of this article was first published in ‘How it feels to… dance at the Olympics’ in The Sunday Times Magazine on 17 July 2016.
This post is also one of 13 short stories featured in my book, A Little Book of Sport Stories. The true life tales of my eventful sport fan life, also include That Time I Was A Stuntwoman In a Film and That Time Sport Saved My Soul.
If you liked this post you may enjoy…
My Olympic Odyssey (Part 1/15): It begins
My Olympic Odyssey (Part 2/15): Soul saved
My Olympic Odyssey (Part 3/15): Stars align
