Introduction: The Cultural Politics of London 2012

Why dedicate a special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review to the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games and Cultural Olympiad when, for so many observers, the Olympics and events related to them already commandeer far, far more attention and resources than they deserve, and potentially cause enormous social, cultural and material damage? After all, these winter and summer events biannually channel the public resources of host cities and nations into what many cultural critics would see as a spectacular circus,¹ simultaneously diverting public funds from vital social needs – such as healthcare, affordable housing and arts provision – and distracting what might otherwise be a caring society from rising up in protest. As many historical examples painfully attest, these events risk celebrating not only competition and elitism but also jingoism, blind patriotism and violent nationalism. They increasingly appear to prioritize business to the detriment of putative Olympic ideals. Affiliations with sponsors such as a major soft drink manufacturer challenge the Games’ commitments to sport and health. Short-term concentration on visitor/consumer experiences of ‘the main event’ mean that long-term responsibilities – to the Games’ sites, local residents, ecological futures – are frequently ignored. Before the Games, site residents are evicted. After the event, sites are lumbered with expensive white elephant ‘resources’, and promises regarding regeneration and environmental legacy are forgotten. The Games police participants’ identities, scrutinizing, categorizing and effectively restricting not only nationality, but also gender, dis/ability and, increasingly, sexuality, as is becoming clear in the approach to the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia. The Games and their affiliated events also police places, escalating local ‘security’ on the scale of war. Cultural Olympiads are potentially complicit in all of these problems, extending the reach of the Games’ ideological net by giving them cultural authority and drawing in the participation of millions in ways that appear to make appreciation and approval of the Games mandatory, part of practising citizenship in a way that is presented simply as correct.

In answer to our opening question, then, all of these potential problems are precisely part of why it is important to dedicate this issue of CTR to the cultural politics of the London 2012 Games and Cultural Olympiad.

These events further demand critical cultural attention because of their scale: authors of Understanding the Olympics John Horne and Garry Whannel call the Olympics ‘one of the world’s strongest brands’;² 204 nations sent more than 10,000 athletes to compete in 300 events at the London 2012 Olympics;³ and global television audiences reportedly reached 900 million for the Olympics’ opening ceremony on Friday 27 July.⁴

The Games and related events in London in particular demand attention for several reasons, including their explicit commitments to environmentalism, regeneration and the Paralympics.⁵ Also important are the specifics of their economics post-2008, in a context of imposed public ‘austerity’ under Conservative UK Chancellor George Osborne,⁶ and in contrast with the comparative extravagance of the 2008 Beijing Summer Games, where the opening ceremony reportedly cost US$100 million.⁷ Important too is their relationships to terrorism and security, following the fatal bombings that occurred on London public transport in 2005, less than a day after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) awarded the 2012 Games to host city London.

Explicitly cultural aspects of the London Games and related events also demand analysis. These events explicitly emphasize the representation of disability as well as gender; this was the first Olympics in which every competing nation’s team included women.⁸ They made an enormous raid on UK Lottery funds – to a total of £2.175 billion – resulting in direct losses to arts funding in the context of already-shrinking Arts Council budgets.⁹ The hugely theatrical shows that are the Olympic and Paralympic opening ceremonies were highly acclaimed, while the Olympics’ closing ceremony was widely derided. There is also the startling fact of, not only the quality, but the very scale of the Cultural Olympiad – with 177,717 activities and 43.4 million public engagement experiences – all of which might be seen as a bonfire of the vanities in the face of otherwise shrinking resources for UK arts.¹⁰

Critical engagement which focuses on culture and performance in the Games and related events is especially important because it facilitates examination of practices of representation, performance and participation. It helps us understand the circulation of feelings – from patriotism to joy, despair, affiliation, awe, jealousy and difference. It forces reflection on the significance of where, when and how acts are performed and on the nature of relationships between the Games, artists, art and audiences. And it can help us explore the potentials of representation to imagine and produce alternative ways of being.

Overall, this issue of CTR aims to explore cultural activity within the Cultural Olympiad, in the Games’ opening and closing ceremonies and in relation to the London 2012 Games more broadly. It does not aim to be comprehensive, though it does aim to explore a good range of cultural activities, large and small, metropolitan and rural, based in and out of London, on land and on sea, and both explicitly artistic and ‘simply’ cultural. The issue poses no single argument. That said, article authors consistently interrogate the cultural effects of the practices they examine, identifying artists’ and agencies’ stated aims, testing them against the authors’ own experiences and readings of events and frequently exploring creative practices’ implicit and explicit critiques of hegemonic Olympic ideologies. The articles often share a tendency to perceive many of the would-be values of the Games with scepticism, a scepticism long shared by many on the left and in the arts. They explore artists’ efforts to interrogate the Games and to recalibrate things such as: ‘participation’, especially popular participation; people’s relationships to places and nations; ideas of the collective ‘we’ often cultivated by the Games; ways of using and challenging spectacle; and expectations of bodies. The articles tend to focus on provocations posed by the Games (as outlined in our opening paragraph). However, they also often implicitly acknowledge opportunities that the Games opened up, through unusual commissioning calls and the kinds of extraordinary juxtapositions that can occur when so much performance happens in proximity in such a concentrated period of time and when so much attention is focused on – and/or against – a common point of reference.

The Olympic Games and Performance Studies

The articles in this issue can challenge the political and cultural domination of the Games from so many broad perspectives – bringing together theoretical analysis, embodied experience and ideological critique, as suggested above – because they do so from the interdisciplinary ground of performance studies. This is a critical position that enables us to understand London 2012 and the Cultural Olympiad as performance, as cultural acts that, to borrow Diana Taylor’s words, ‘are rehearsed and performed daily in the public sphere’.¹¹ Understanding the cultural expressions produced during the Games from a performance studies perspective signals an intervention in a field that, historically, has invoked performance as an antitheatrical epithet. If performance has any general use-value for critical Olympic scholars, then it is, as we note above, to designate the Games as a ‘spectacular circus’. This description reduces performance to spectacle and spectacle to an apparatus of state and corporate oppression that is applied to host cities. In this scenario, spectacle is not a culturally specific event; it is an opiate that reduces citizens to dupes who cannot critically examine the ‘real’ cost of the Games because they are too overwhelmed by national feeling and competitive euphoria. The articles here do not repeat that story. This is not because they are any less sceptical of the Olympic movement than other critics. It is because they understand performance, even a ‘spectacular circus’, as a process constituted by embodied and material exchanges that unfold through time, involving multiple actors; they do not see it as a thing that can simply and straightforwardly be imposed by Olympic powers.

The Articles in This Issue: Shared Approaches and Resonances

What this issue does, instead of repeating a story that turns critical thinking against national feeling, is show what performance studies brings to understandings of London 2012 and the Cultural Olympiad. In preparing this issue, the shared approaches, contexts and critical observations that stood out to us included the following.

The performance of regeneration

Articles by Jen Harvie and Hari Marini discuss how London 2012 host city bid campaigns and new city landmarks in the Olympic Park reimagined East London as an urban ideal rather than a place with specific economic, political and social priorities. These contributions challenge the veracity of the legacy objectives of London 2012 – to ‘transform the heart of East London’ – by pointing to the ways regeneration better served an imported visitor class than it did East Londoners.¹²

The performance of human rights

Contributions by Colette Conroy and Keren Zaiontz reveal the ways the authors’ respective physical commitment to, and personal investment in, the Paralympic Games and Paralympic opening ceremony shaped their analyses of local activist communities. Moreover, the disability athletes and artists they discuss are shown to have their own personal and political reasons for taking part in the Paralympics, including making the human rights of disabled people in the UK a visible, public issue. In an exploration of artist Olafur Eliasson’s use (and interrogation) of spectacle, Simone Hancox’s article considers the potential for Cultural Olympiad projects to challenge global inequalities, especially in the distribution of resources.

Critical acts of belonging

Articles by Marilena Zaroulia and Fiona Wilkie examine the mobile, water-based artworks Nowhereisland and The Boat Project commissioned as part of the Cultural Olympiad’s Artists Taking the Lead programme. Their articles show how artists met the challenge of creating large-scale artist-led community artworks in ways that refused compulsory acts of participation and instead initiated critical modes of national belonging and even ‘active non-participation’.

The mis-performance of civic identities

Contributions by James Wilson and co-authors Marissia Fragkou and Philip Hager detail how the lives of ‘everyday people’ in Bradford and London were used to create the urban stage portraits The Mill – City of Dreams and 100% London. These productions were intended to be acts of legacy, sponsored by the Cultural Olympiad, which testified to the diversity of histories of place. However, in straddling the line between art and social engagement, artists showed themselves to be either resistant to taking on the role of social workers (insisting, for example, that their work be understood as art), or simply unequipped to provide a socially efficacious experience (for example, reducing local lives to formulaic performances of multiculturalism).

Self-organized participation

Three of our contributors, Louise Owen and co-authors Susan Bennett and Julie Sanders, travelled to rural, site-specific performances: Owen went to Norfolk to take part in Walking, set in a nature reserve; and Bennett and Sanders attended Coriolan/us, set in a disused military base in South Wales. In contrast to the urban performances in Bradford and London, the participants here had to implicate themselves in the event by hailing themselves as informed tourists and/or citizens. Their spectatorship was dependent upon how they strategized their own social membership within, and physical movement through, the performance environments.

The Structure of the Issue

We open this issue by addressing performance and place in East London, the principal site of the London 2012 Games. The Games, we were assured, would not only be a big party that happened to take place east of Big Ben and Buckingham Palace; it would create new jobs for locals, lead to ‘transport improvements’ and upgrade the image of the Olympic host boroughs of Newham, Hackney, Barking and Dagenham, Greenwich, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest.¹³ Stratford, the city centre of Newham borough, was the site of major redevelopment projects that included the Olympic Park, and it represented London 2012’s key legacy objective: as noted above, to ‘transform the heart of East London’. The full post-Games re-opening of the park, rechristened Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, will take years (it is ‘unfolding’ in stages from 2013–17).¹⁴ But London Mayor Boris Johnson, and the coalition Conservative–Liberal Democrat UK government are already claiming Olympic legacy victory¹⁵ – despite the fact that critics and researchers caution there are few reliable metrics to measure post-Olympic legacy.¹⁶

Jen Harvie’s piece focuses not on the Games’ actual regeneration effects on and for East London. Rather, it focuses on the Games’ mis- and underrepresentation of East London and its comparative deprivations, and the Games’ contrasting attention to and celebration of West London, central London and an economically savvy, market-successful, corporate ‘brand London’. She argues that the Games’ organizers’ effective neglect and even suppression of East London and its deprivations undermined the Games’ putative commitment to regenerating the area. The ultimate risk of this suppression, her article suggests, is that it implicitly, prematurely and disastrously legitimates the future failure of the Games’ East London regeneration legacy.

While Keren Zaiontz’s piece is also largely focused on events in East London, it engages with how London 2012 arts and protest events, including aspects of the Paralympic opening ceremony, in which she performed, can effectively challenge problematic hegemonic structures from a position apparently within those structures. She considers associated risks, such as becoming a duped collaborator with problematic hegemonies. And she considers potential benefits, such as exploiting available funding and enormous opportunities for exposure and visibility. She questions on what and whose terms event participants can define not only their participation, but also what they understand their citizenship to stand for.

Colette Conroy explores the complex and often fraught relationships between the Paralympics and disabled identities and her own ambivalence about the Paralympics’ relationship to disability activism and disabled identities. She focuses her analysis through what she identifies as three texts: the almost rhetorical question widely iterated in summer 2012 of whether the Paralympics might make a real difference to and for disability; her own ambivalent experiences of identification and jealous differentiation in relation to champion British cyclist Sarah Storey; and the Paralympics opening ceremony and some of the many things it showed, including myriad disabled bodies and representations of disabled bodies, origin myths of progress founded on disabled bodies, and more. Conroy explores the ways that community identities (such as a politically important shared understanding of a community of disability) rely on shared myths. And she considers the complexity of the myths of disability and athleticism that were posed and problematized through the 2012 Paralympics.

The next set of articles address the performance events that were produced as part of the four-year cultural programme that paralleled the Games, the London Cultural Olympiad (2008–12). Situated on land and water, in parks and streets, in galleries and theatres, the Cultural Olympiad involved the mass participation of communities in state-sponsored public art events that promoted the Olympic host nation to a global audience. Like the Games, the Cultural Olympiad was required to demonstrate that its programme produced social benefit and created a ‘legacy for those who participated’.¹⁷ Legacy was to be achieved by funding new cultural activities and commissions to support a nationally representative programme of arts projects and events throughout the UK.

Many projects were the recipient of funds by Legacy Trust UK, including the Bradford production, The Mill – City of Dreams.¹⁸ James Wilson examines how this community-based project achieves many of the legacy ambitions of the Cultural Olympiad. It was set outside London, showing that the Games had a positive reach beyond the host city. Moreover, the piece itself involved upwards of 200 participants and local residents who collaborated with professional artists and shared in sustained discussions about Bradford’s economic and social future. Wilson positions The Mill – City of Dreams as a hybrid between socially engaged and aesthetic art practice and argues for a reading of the production that does not reduce it to a utilitarian legacy outcome of the Cultural Olympiad. Instead he calls on readers to conceive of the social and aesthetic in The Mill – City of Dreams as simultaneous experiences, as community outreach and as transformative art.

The culmination of the Cultural Olympiad was the nationwide London 2012 Festival (21 June – 9 September), a showcase and unifying brand identity for thousands of events and festivals that were principally funded by the Arts Councils. Among those productions that were presented as part of the Festival was Rimini Protokoll’s 100% London, which premiered in the East London Olympic host borough of Hackney, weeks before the Olympic and Paralympic Games. In 100% London statistics are re-animated through one hundred ‘everyday’ Londoners who assemble onstage to each represent one percentile of the city based on the categories of gender, age, ethnic background, region of London and household status. Marissia Fragkou and Philip Hager discuss this production in relation to the global Occupy movement, one of the most visible urban protest movements to emerge in response to the 2008 global economic downturn. Occupy mobilized an elite/street narrative that claimed to represent the 99 per cent who had lost pensions, jobs and homes because of the mistakes made by the 1 per cent who had run, risked and mismanaged global financial markets. Fragkou and Hager detail the collective practices of Occupy London Stock Exchange (LSX) and compare these emergent forms of self-selecting civic assembly against the stage-managed diversity performed in 100% London.

The Cultural Olympiad’s ‘flagship’ programme, Artists Taking the Lead (ATL), funded twelve ‘extraordinary public art commissions’ – one in each nation and region of the UK – designed ‘to engage audiences and inspire local communities’.¹⁹ Artists had to demonstrate how their proposed works were animated by the larger values of the Olympic spirit. As a result, many of the winning commissions highlighted the value of group participation and shared a similar plotline in terms of how audiences were to engage with the artworks: everyday people work together to create an event or art object that is extraordinary because it celebrates the combined life of the community and/or the natural landscape of the region. Two ATL commissions discussed in this issue, in contributions by Fiona Wilkie and Marilena Zaroulia, reveal that the ATL plotline of ordinary citizen/extraordinary event was flexible enough to allow for participatory artworks that not only repeated but called into question the ideals of national belonging.

Alex Hartley’s Nowhereisland, a community-led land art piece for the South West, performed the foundational origins of a nation by legally appointing the status of a ‘real’ nation to a piece of an island from the melting arctic. Participants could register online and in person to become citizens and take part in national acts such as collectively authoring a declaration. When Zaroulia, a citizen of the island, paid a visit to the nation at one of its regional events she experienced a gap between Nowhereisland’s ideals – ‘the openness and ambiguity suggested in its conception’ – and its materiality – ‘its surface was sharp and threatening, allowing none to cross the border and step on the island-nation’s territory’.²⁰ Her feeling of displacement when confronted with the physical island shows the modern nation to be an imagined construct that is as vulnerable to idealism as it is to the environmental consequences of a warming planet.

Questioning patriotic ideals of belonging was also a feature of Lone Twin’s The Boat Project. This participatory artwork for the South East was made up of 1,200 donated items of wood and the personal narratives connected with them. Wilkie argues that Lone Twin did not blindly adopt participation as a utopian ideal of either nationalism or Olympism. Instead the company reworked the terms of participation around telling stories, both banal and extraordinary, and also attended to the fact that participation was not contingent upon donating one’s story or time to the project. Wilkie notes that ‘while the Olympics is structured around competition, which values and celebrates participation most when it leads to winning, Lone Twin feel strongly that active non-participation should be a valid, and valued, option for anyone encountering the work’.²¹

Louise Owen’s experience of traversing the north Norwich coastline as part of Robert Wilson’s ambulatory piece, Walking, moves us in the opposite direction of Lone Twin’s commitment to active non-participation. In Walking, Owen was largely responsible for her engagement with a series of art installations designed by Wilson and set in a nature reserve. These artworks were not, Owen emphasizes, ‘informative or entertaining distraction[s] from the walk’, but perceptual openings that made her more aware of the natural environment.²² Owen situates this convergence of art and nature within a much older form of landscape tourism, the eighteenth-century picturesque, in which tourists set out to trace ‘resemblances between art and nature’.²³ She evidences this connection through the ways the three-and-a-half mile walk provoked generative associations for her that ranged from the work of humorist P. G. Wodehouse to that of filmmaker Patrick Keiller.

Similarly, Susan Bennett and Julie Sanders entered a performance environment marked by its physical remoteness and self-structured participation. The authors travelled to the disused Royal Air Force hangar in the countryside outside Cardiff, RAF St Athan, to witness Mike Pearson and Mike Brooke’s site-specific production of Brecht and Shakespeare’s Coriolan/us. Inside the hangar, spectators wore audio headsets that allowed them to hear the dialogue from any point within the site. Coriolan/us was performed “live” and for live feeds to a central screen, which meant that audiences could choose for themselves where to stand or sit in relation to the action. This proxemic act quickly revealed itself to be a theatrical one. Bennett and Sanders note how ‘both the “here” and “there” of the play were deliberately and consistently mediatized and in this way self-consciously performed’.²⁴ Their movement through the site revealed how citizens constantly negotiate their relationship to national events through a split-focus attention that places them at the centre of a celebration or crisis over ‘there’ even while they occupy a lived position ‘here’.

Simone Hancox’s article explores the negotiations of spectacle proposed by eminent Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson in two projects he pitched to the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG), one of which was realised and one of which was not. For Hancox, Eliasson and many others, Olympic spectacle poses the enormous risk of both creating and legitimating an almighty distraction that diverts global resources and attention from pressing social needs. Hancox investigates Eliasson’s proposed and realised experiments in exploring, countering and refusing spectacle: the unrealised Take a deep breath would have recorded millions of breaths globally online; and Olafur Eliasson: Little Sun used and distributed solar lamps. She proposes that though the latter, realised project has the advantage of directly supplying solar lamps in areas in need in Africa, the former, unrealised project offered a more effective challenge to the hegemonies of Olympic spectacle by offering apparently nothing to look at. (Artist Martin Creed deployed this tactic to some degree in his Work No 1197, All the Bells in a Country Rung as Quickly and Loudly as Possible for Three Minutes, the Cultural Olympiad commission which opened the London Games.) Like Zaiontz, Hancox considers the value of using access to the Olympics, Cultural Olympiad and huge potential registers of spectacle to challenge Olympic hegemonies and the monopoly of spectacle.

The last two contributions in this issue return our attention to where we began, in East London. These documents address the public art practices produced in the Olympic Park through community-based and architectural initiatives. In her analysis of the ArcelorMittal Orbit sculpture in the Olympic Park, Hari Marini explores how landscape is rendered spectacle. She explains that ArcelorMittal Orbit ‘is a permanent, steel, spiralling red tower, which finds itself between art and architecture, and intends to commemorate London 2012 and become a symbol of the area’s regeneration’.²⁵ Marini gives good reasons to be ambivalent, if not downright suspicious, of the place of this distinct landmark in East London, and also of what it can offer communities in the Lower Lea Valley, not least in bearing the name of its multinational patron, ArcelorMittal steel and mining company. The tower may be situated in Newham, one of the most deprived boroughs in the UK, but its architectural priorities reveal it to be in active dialogue and competition with other, far away global city landmarks, such as the Eiffel Tower.

An artist who witnessed the day-in, day-out building of the Olympic Park and navigated the politics and pressures of that transformation is Neville Gabie. Between October 2010 and December 2011, Gabie acted as Olympic artist-in-residence. He was the only artist on-site during the construction phase of the Park and, with curator Sam Wilkinson, he developed Great Lengths, a series of public art pieces about the site and its workers. In an interview with Keren Zaiontz, Gabie and Wilkinson discuss the challenge of creating art on a construction site that also acted as a global stage for the UK. At one point, Gabie decided to separate himself from the Park to gain critical distance from the Olympic messaging that permeated the site. However, when on-site, neither he nor Wilkinson ring-fenced themselves from Park workers but collaborated with them at all levels. This artistic stance on the Games accounted for the material life of the Park site, its past inhabitants and its present workers, rather than the abstracted rhetoric of would-be future regeneration.

London 2012

Like all other modern-era Olympic and Paralympic Games and Cultural Olympiads, London 2012 was a mega-event; it consequently carried a weight of ambitions, tensions, hopes, disappointments, overblown and disputed budgets, political baggage, stunning moments and much more. The London 2012 Games and Cultural Olympiad, in particular, took place at a time of global reckoning – in the aftermath of the 2008 economic downturn. And, for the UK, they took place at a time that was marked by epochal events and powerful – often powerfully conflicting – feelings and political commitments. These included commitments to and against the monarchy, ‘the system’, the 1 per cent and the 99 per cent, the welfare state, the very Union of the Kingdom and more. To draw that time back into view, the Olympic events of summer 2012 took place: only a year after the globally watched wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge; almost precisely one year after urban riots that ignited in North (East) London and shockingly spread across the capital and then England; in the context of an ‘austerity’ budget introduced by the Conservative-led coalition government from 2010 on, and in that budget’s contexts of quick-moving cuts to welfare; mere months after the eventual eviction of long-term protesters from the Occupy LSX site; also mere months after Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond announced his party’s intention to hold a referendum on Scotland’s independence in 2014;²⁶ and in a summer shared with Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee and its multiple, affiliated, high-profile celebrations.

In this febrile moment came London 2012, with its myriad cultural representations and the Cultural Olympiad’s blockbusting programme of hundreds of artistic events. This issue of CTR aims to address, in this context, some of the resonances of London 2012, including how it can help us think about culture and regeneration, effective arts activism, spectacle, relationships to sites and to others, and configurations of ‘we’. We hope that this issue stimulates further future research beyond 2012.

Notes

1. See, for example, Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994 [1967]).

2. John Horne and Garry Whannel, Understanding the Olympics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), p. ix.

3. BBC Sport, ‘Olympics: Countries’, BBC, 13 August, 2012, <http://www.bbc.com/sport/olympics/2012/countries> [accessed, 13 August 2013].

4. Avril Ormsby, ‘London 2012 Opening Ceremony Draws 900 Million Viewers’, Reuters, 7 August 2012, <http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/08/07/uk-oly-ratings-day-idUKBRE8760V820120807> [accessed 13 August 2013].

5. For details, see articles in this issue by Jen Harvie, Keren Zaiontz, Colette Conroy and Hari Marini.

6. Osborne was memorably booed at a Paralympics awards ceremony in the Olympic Stadium on 3 September 2012, as recorded in a clip from Channel 4 News: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqM0Ube0oLs> [accessed 13 August 2013].

7. Olivia Parker, ‘London 2012: Olympic Ceremonies Through the Ages’, Telegraph, 12 August 2013, <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/9429085/London-2012-Olympic-ceremonies-through-the-ages.html> [accessed 13 August 2013].

8. See, for example, Sarah Brown, ‘London 2012: The Women’s Olympics?’, CNN, 10 August 2012, <http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/10/sport/london-olympics-women> [accessed 13 August 2013].

9. Arts Council England’s budget was cut by 30 per cent in 2010. Jen Harvie, Fair Play – Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), ch. 4, ‘Public Private Capital: Arts Funding Cuts and Mixed Economies’, pp. 150–91, especially p. 155 onward.

10. Beatriz Garcia, ‘London 2012 Cultural Olympiad Evaluation Executive Summary’, Liverpool: Institute of Cultural Capital, 25 April 2013. This document is available at Arts Council England <http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/news/arts-council-news/London-2012-Cultural-Olympiad-evaluation/> [accessed 22 October, 2013].

11. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 3.

12. Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), Our Promise for 2012: How the UK Will Benefit from the Olympic and Paralympic Games (London: DCMS, June 2007), p. 3.

13. Graeme Evans, ‘London 2012’, in Olympic Cities: City Agendas, Planning and the World Games, 1896–2016, ed. by John R. Gold and Margaret M. Gold (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 359–89 (p. 360).

14. See ‘Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park – Watch the Park Unfold’, <http://queenelizabetholympicpark.co.uk/vision/park-timeline> [accessed 13 August 2013].

15. See their joint report, Inspired by 2012: The Legacy from the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games: A Joint UK Government and Mayor of London Report (London: Mayor of London, July 2013), <http://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2901179_OlympicLegacy_acc.pdf> [accessed 13 August 2013].

16. Andy Thornley, ‘The 2012 London Olympics. What legacy?’, Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events, 4 (July 2012), 206–10.

17. The Cultural Olympiad set out to increase the participation of young people and ‘disabled artists and participants’ in cultural activities through mass events such as Big Dance and the Unlimited Festival. See Garcia, London 2012 Cultural Olympiad Evaluation Summary, p. 16.

18. On Legacy Trust UK’s webpage, ‘About Legacy Trust UK’, they explain that ‘[o]ur funding is provided by the Big Lottery Fund (£29 million), Department for Culture Media and Sport (£6 million for UK School Games) and Arts Council England (£5 million).’ Legacy Trust UK, <http://www.legacytrustuk.org/info/About/> [accessed 13 August 2013].

19. ‘Artists Taking the Lead’, Arts Council England, </http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/what-we-do2/our-priorities-2011-15/london-2012/artists-taking-the-lead/> [accessed 13 August 2013].

20. See in this issue, Marilena Zaroulia, ‘“Not for us what can be dreamed or imagined, described or spoken of”: Alex Hartley’s Nowhereisland and the “impossible” of the Olympics’, 553–62 (p. 559).

21. See in this issue, Fiona Wilkie, ‘Beyond the Blank Canvas: Lone Twin’s The Boat Project’, 563–67 (p. 565).

22. See in this issue, Louise Owen, ‘Robert Wilson, Walking (Holkham Estate, 2012)’, 568–73 (p. 570).

23. Ibid., p. 569.

24. See in this issue, Susan Bennett and Julie Sanders, ‘Here/ There: National Theatre Wales’s Coriolan/us, 8–18 August 2012, Hangar 858, RAF St Athan, Vale of Glamorgan (directed by Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes)’, 574–78 (p. 576).

25. See in this issue, Hari Marini, ‘The ArcelorMittal Orbit’s Ambivalent Effect and the London Olympics: Art, Regeneration, Business and Sustainability’, 587–92 (p. 587).

26. BBC News, ‘Salmond Calls for Independence Referendum in 2014’, BBC News, 10 January 2012, <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-16478121> [accessed 13 August 2013].