From Painting to Performance: Queer Recontextualization Through the Lens of Intermedial Translation

Queer culture elbowed its way into the mainstream through a forceful and highly controversial representation in the Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony. The opening ceremony, directed by queer director Thomas Jolly, featured a queer performance that drew inspiration from the painting entitled The Feast of the Gods by the seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age artist Jan van Bijlert. The aim of the present study is to analyze the queer performance in the Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony from the prism of intermedial translation. The principal thrust of the study is scrutinizing the recontextualization of Jan van Bijlert’s painting, the source text, into a performance, the target text, in a new medium that serves the queer agenda through providing a vast space for the articulation of the queer ideology of visibility and inclusivity. The study employs Greenall and Løfaldli’s (2019) proposed five levels of recontextualization, namely medial, generic, cultural, ideological, and linguistic, for the analysis of the transformation of the source text when it is translated into a dissimilar medium to actualize the aforementioned queer goal. The significance of the study lies in its attempt to align with current scholarly endeavors to devote more attention to forms of translation where the written language is no longer the sole and dominant mode in meaning-making.