Less than 100 days before the Olympic torch illuminates Paris, the Louvre Museum has been transformed into a sports territory with yoga classes, disco music and a new exhibition that deals with the reinvention of the Olympic Games at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the XX.
In addition to all that, in the same museum you can now take “sports tours” conceived by the French dancer and choreographer Mehdi Kerkouche. In these classes, lucky groups will be able to practice yoga, do cardiovascular training or dance to disco music in front of the museum’s most famous works such as ‘La Gioconda’, ‘Venus de Milo’ or ‘Liberty Leading the People‘.
FRANCE, COMMITTED TO CULTURAL OLYMPISM
These classes will be the aperitif before the marathon and cycling pass through this former royal palace located in the heart of the capital of France. More than two thousand projects throughout France are intended to unite French society around Olympic values and show the historical link between art and the Olympic Games.
The president of the Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games, Tony Estanguet, has admitted along with those responsible for the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Orangerie and the Quai Branly that “the dream was a bit crazy” in addition to commenting that all the Previous museums will also have a very interesting Olympic-cultural program.
France and the Olympic Games have a very close relationship and the Louvre will attest to this with the exhibition that delves into the origins of modern Olympicism, whose great promoter was the Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin. The exhibition, which has been baptized “Olympism. A modern invention, an ancient heritage” rescues two main figures who contributed to the development of the Games as we know them today but who have not been lucky enough to pass down to posterity in the same way that Coubertin did: the Swiss painter Émile Gilliéron and the French philologist Michel Bréal.
Gilliéron was fundamental in the development of Olympic iconography, supported by the works of the Louvre. Bréal is considered the father of modern semantics and the inventor of the marathon. The Louvre exhibition contrasts the proposal of the three, Coubertin, Gilliéron and Bréal, with the historical sources from which they drew, through works from classical antiquity and rescues trophies, images and documents from the first editions of the Games.