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

Introduction

The verbal mode used to hold sway over the field of translation studies for a great deal of time. The situation, however, has changed. Currently, there is a growing attention directed toward widening the scope of translation beyond the restrictive written language by exploring forms of translation where the non-verbal mode preponderates. Translation is an essentially semiotic process that entails the transfer of material from the source semiotic system to the target semiotic system (Kourdis, 2015). This brings into sharp focus the contiguity between translation and semiotics, which accordingly opens the boundaries of translation to include non-verbal texts. The first to contribute to this expansion is Jakobson (1959/2000) by dividing translation into three categories, with intersemiotic translation being one of them. Intersemiotic translation is concerned with translation between verbal and non-verbal sign systems. One of the major shortcomings of Jakobson’s (1959/2000) definition of intersemiotic translation is that it pays no attention to the possibility of translation between two non-verbal sign systems without involving any written language  (Marais, 2019; O’Halloran et al., 2016). However, this parochial conceptualization of translation has been revolutionized with the emergence of multimodality and intermediality studies (Marais, 2019). Jakobson’s (1959/2000) definition of intersemiotic translation has expanded and incorporated forms of translation that do not include any written language (Queiroz & Atã, 2020). It has been replaced by the term “intermedial” to remedy the limitation contained within its definition where one of the mediums is necessarily verbal (Rota, 2023). Dethroning written language as the archetypal mode of communication stretches the purview of translation research, ultimately concocting a broader semiotic perception of translation that undermines “the fixation on linguistic equivalence between the ST and the TT and addresses multiple modes of realization” (Liao, 2023, p. 50). Phenomena that are not acknowledged as acts of translation can still possess certain aspects that qualify them as translations as “wherever there is semiosis, there will be some kind of translational aspect to it” (Marais, 2019, p. 5). This holds true regarding treating the queer performance in the Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony as a case of translation, specifically intermedial translation, of Jan van Bijlert’s painting The Feast of the Gods. The painting serves as a palimpsest, a source of inspiration for the queer performance. In the process of transferring it into a new medium, certain elements of the original painting have been reworked and recontextualized, putting the queer agenda on the front burner. In light of this, the present study attempts to address the following research question:

How is the intermedial translation of Jan van Bijlert’s painting The Feast of the Gods into a queer performance in the Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony reflective of the queer agenda of visibility and inclusivity?

1. Literature Review
   • Intermediality

Scholars encounter difficulties in crafting a comprehensive definition for the term “intermediality” as it is applied in a myriad of fields. In its simplest form, intermediality is concerned with “the relationships between media and is hence used to describe a huge range of cultural phenomena which involve more than one medium” (Rippl, 2015, p. 1). The prefix “inter” in the term intermediality reflects the notion of crossing borders and interconnecting a variety of mediums (Chandler & Munday, 2011; Elleström, 2010; Rajewsky, 2005). The term “medium” is of Latin origin and denotes “‘in between’ … a mediator, something that enables communication across time and space” (Bruhn & Schirrmacher, 2022, p. 9) (e.g., books, theatres, movies, paintings), whereas the term “mode” refers to how meaning is communicated (e.g., verbal and non-verbal modes of communication). The end of the twentieth century marks the burgeoning of intermediality as a field of study (Bruhn & Schirrmacher, 2022). The growing interest in intermediality studies stems from the ubiquity of artworks that fuse various forms of media or make allusions to them (Rippl, 2015). Conceptually complex and closely related to interart studies, intermediality bears a relationship with “the avant-garde understanding of a work of art as an experiment, happening, or performance” (Grishakova, 2024, p. 14). This notion of experimentation inherent in intermediality can be explored in the remit of translation.

• Intermedial Translation.

The realm of translation studies has long fixated on translation between written languages, paying minuscule attention to forms of translation between non-verbal mediums. The focus on intermedial translation is sharpened with the concomitant recognition that translation is not bound to the verbal mode (Kaźmierczak, 2024). The element of intermediality is intrinsic to translation, and this is evident in the definition of translation offered in The Oxford English Dictionary. It is defined as “the expression or rendering of something in another medium or form, e.g. of a painting by an engraving or etching” (Simpson & Weiner, 1989, p. 410). Simply put, intermedial translation refers to “translation of one medium out of itself into multisensory, or cross-sensory, consciousness” (Scott, 2010, p. 154) and a “transgression of boundaries between conventionally distinct media” (Wolf, 2011, p. 2). This element of crossing entails dealing with “intertextuality, intersemiotics and interdisciplinarity, which can lead to movements across genres, media, bodies of knowledge and subjects” (Bal & Morra, 2007, p. 7). In intermedial translation, there can be traces to the source medium, but modifications and divergences are almost inevitable, with the source text being reworked in a new medium (Iedema, 2003; Schober, 2010). Transformation is a corollary of the intermedial shifts between different forms of art and medium. It is manifested on a variety of levels including, but not limited to, language, images, gestures, and colors. Such manifold transformations contribute to refashioning “the source theme and the narrative devices towards a new architectonics” (Ceciu, 2021, p. 552). When adopting an intermedial lens to the study of translation, the features peculiar to the source and target mediums should be taken into account so as to determine the features that need to be transformed and those that can be shared. The greater the differences between the source and target mediums, the greater the transformations that need to be carried out. Intermediality pivots on the crossover that transpires between artifacts that belong to different mediums. Studying an artifact as an instantiation of intermedial translation deems the translator’s interpretation integral to the transfer of the object of the source medium into the target medium (Rota, 2023). The process of intermedial translation and the experimentation it involves result in dichotomies between the original text and its translation, where the translator flaunts their agency and takes liberties in steering the original text toward a new goal.

Schober (2010) studied Amy Lowell’s verbalization, or rather poetization, of Igor Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for String Quartet from the perspective of intermedial translation. The latter encompasses elements of transfer and appropriation and is argued to have given rise to significant variations on the cultural and expressive levels on account of the different mediums of music and poetry. Among the exemplifications of intermedial translation is the translation of a sculpture (non-verbal medium) into poetry (a verbal medium). This is the line of thought pursued by Tewfik (2016) in her study of poetic ekphrasis as a form of interart (intermedial) translation of the Giza Sphinx sculpture. By virtue of the dissimilarities between art mediums, it is hard to conceive of translation as simply an objective reflection of the original artifact; rather, the translator breathes new life into it (Tewfik, 2016). The poems written about the Giza Sphinx are not direct translations but rather use the sculpture as a source of inspiration, and the resulting poems are reformulations of the non-verbal source medium to serve certain purposes (Tewfik, 2016). In the context of paintings, Montesi (2021) investigated the conversion of Hieronymus Bosch’s sixteenth-century painting The Garden of Earthly Delights into Marie Chouinard’s modern dance Jérôme Bosch: Les Jardin des Délices from the angle of intermedial translation. Her study combines translation and intermediality to shed light on the possibility of treating translation as a space for creativity and for challenging certain beliefs. Translation and intermediality can coalesce as they both involve “the transmission and transformation of texts across and within modes and media” (Montesi, 2021, p. 169). Translation studies from the prism of intermediality are invested in tracing the points of convergence between different types of medium as well as the changes that take place during the transfer process where contexts shift. These changes and shifts are best captured in the concept of recontextualization.

Recontextualization refers to the act of “moving meaning material from one context with its social organization of participants and its modal ensembles to another, with its different social organization and modal ensembles” (Bezemer & Kress, 2008, p. 184). The use of recontextualization as an analytical tool has expanded beyond its originial pedagogical context and has come to be employed in analyzing the dynamics of the travel of meaning from one context to another and revealing the impetus behind the reshaping of meaning and communicative purposes (Moschini, 2015).

Translation can be viewed as an act of recontextualization which entails relocation, and this act of relocation by necessity gives rise to changes in meaning (Camiciottoli, 2015; House 2006; Iețcu-Fairclough, 2008). The transformation that occurs during the process of recontextualization is variegated. For example, meaning can be simplified, condensed, refocused, expanded, or elaborated (Bondi et al., 2015). Discourse elements that can undergo recontextualization comprise “linguistic expressions, concepts and propositions, ‘facts’, arguments and lines of argumentation, stories, assessments, values and ideologies, knowledge and theoretical constructs, ways of seeing things and ways of acting towards them, ways of thinking, and ways of saying things” (Linell, 1998, p. 145). A close association exists between recontextualization and “generic repurposing,” where arguments are restructured and purposes are redirected (Lorés, 2024, p. 27). The act of translation encompasses “the movement of text across time and space, and whenever texts move, they also shift frames and discourse worlds” (House, 2006, p. 347). Conceptually, there is a connection between context and the notions of frame, environment, and background. They all intersect in the way they lay focus on the circumstances that influence the interpretation of objects (House, 2021). Frame and context are related in the way they take the recipients down a particular path apropos of interpreting a given text. By the same token, a discourse world refers to “a superordinate structure for interpreting meaning in a certain way” (House, 2006, p. 347). Recontextualization is far from being an impartial process of transferring fixed meaning. In recontextualization, some aspects in the original context that are central may be rendered marginal in the new context (Linell, 1998). The driving force of recontextualization corresponds to a type of “agency-structure dialectic” (Iețcu-Fairclough, 2008, p. 69). Selecting a particular text to translate and the choices made during translation are connected to the goals of the agents involved in translation as well as their ideological agendas. Transplanting a text in a new context to serve certain purposes of certain agents gives rise to “ideological appropriation” (Iețcu-Fairclough, 2008, p. 72). Target texts can be assigned functions that are distinct from the function of the source text. To exemplify this idea, a translator can recontextualize a source text by making it serve as a statement of resistance and subversion, which might be different from the illocutionary force ascribed to the source text by its author (Iețcu-Fairclough, 2008). Translation is naturally a metonymic act; not all elements of the source text are transferred. This aspect of metonymy allows translators to fulfil certain objectives. It brings into sharper focus the “ideological agency” of translators; their choices reflect their ideological stances, which is realized in deciding to preserve certain aspects of the source text and refashioning others (Tymoczko, 2007/2014, p. 211). The meaning attributed to a translated text is the outcome of the translator’s choices. Such choices “shape the construction of the translated text which then accretes still other meanings associated with its recontextualization and the contributions of a new readership” (Tymoczko, 2007/2014, p. 289). This reinforces the idea that translation and neutrality are antithetical and that translators operate under the sway of certain ideologies.

• Queer Theory

Etymologically, the term “queer” denotes strangeness and peculiarity. However, in the nineteenth century, the term underwent pejoration and started to be used in reference to people who are sexually attracted to others of the same sex category, which fosters its negative connotations of anomaly (Baer, 2021). In the context of identity, queer “encompasses gender and sexual identities that do not align with dominant gender and sexual cultural expectations” (Weise, 2022, p. 485). Queer theory shakes the foundations of the predominant understanding of desire and sexuality. It advocates the fluidity of gender and defies the traditional categorizations that divide gender and sexuality into fixed binaries (Baer & Kaindl, 2018; Pennell, 2022; Thiel, 2017). The development of queer theory came at the hands of the US AIDS crisis in the eighties of the twentieth century and the emergence of theories of postmodernism and poststructuralism (Walters, 2005). According to Wang (2012), postmodernism is “a kind of worldview, or a way of looking at the world and life, in which the world is no longer a world of totality but rather one of plurality, fragmentation, and decentralization” (p. 129). The centrality of the body to queerness harks back to the latter’s intricate connection to the US AIDS crisis and its ensuing backlash; queerness was politically weaponized for the advancement of homosexual rights (Morland & Willox, 2005). The queer ideology stems from “a consciousness of the material vulnerability of certain bodies at risk of contracting the virus; bodies deemed disposable by the state” (Evans, 2020, p. 1). During the US AIDS crisis, the term queer gained an extra layer of meaning related to activism by virtue of the campaigns that promoted gender freedom, giving an air of “an unapologetic, in-your-face activism” (Baer & Kaindl, 2018, p. 2). Activist queer events, such as the Stonewall riots in 1969, testify to the employment of corporeality to press home the importance of acknowledging difference (Croft, 2017). Corporeality is cardinal to queer thought in the way bodies “are not tethered to fixed parameters; rather they are changing and changeable based on one’s own identities, circumstances, and contexts” (Longoria, 2022, p. 128). In other words, queer activists put their bodies to the service of promoting their cause. Visibility is another precept that lies at the core of queer thought. It is imperative to render visible queer individuals in the social, cultural, and political space (Trinh, 2022). This can be realized by, for example, choreographing queer dances and performances. The centrality of the body, the subversion of normativity, and the advocacy of heterogeneity underpin queer performances (Croft, 2017).

Closely connected to the notion of queer performance is the phenomenon of cross-dressing or transvestism. It involves drag queens who are biologically males but dress as women in an extravagant fashion (Phillips, 2006). Initially ostracized, drag culture has secured a place in the Western arena. It relies on parody to take a swipe at gender binarism (Edward & Farrier, 2020; Mendoza, 2022). The phenomenon of cross-dressing undermines the traditional binaries of masculinity and femininity and offers an alternative in the form of a gender continuum (Phillips, 2006). Drag performances are loaded with political and activist messages that condemn discriminatory attitudes and practices against members of the queer community.

• Queer Translation Studies.

Capitalizing on postcolonial and feminist translation studies, the subfield of queer translation studies arose toward the end of the twentieth century. It incorporates studies that examine the utilization of translation in providing a means for the articulation of queer voices (Spišiaková, 2021). On its intersection with the issue of queerness, translation is marked by indeterminacy and is “imbricated with issues of gender and sexuality, playfulness and power” (Epstein & Gillet, 2017, p. 1).

Appropriation of source texts to create new versions that resonate with queer thought can be found in Charles Lum’s experimenting with Brian De Palma’s horror film Carrie by adding audiovisual gay pornographic elements in the recontextualized version Indelible (Elliott, 2009). Frederick Marryat’s The Pacha of Many Tales can be read as an example of a drag pseudo-translation that emulates the structure of Arabian Nights (St. André, 2018). In the context of drag translation, St. André (2018) proposes a metaphor for translation as a “cross-identity performance” where the translator is granted boundless liberties to rework a certain text, dwindling the notion of equivalence which lies at the heart of translation studies (St. André, 2018, p. 86). Marryat’s drag adaptation indulges in using descriptive diction to achieve spectacularization, evoking “the glittering sequins, feather boas, and other over-the-top accoutrements typically favored by drag queens” (p. 90). Manipulating the source text in translation by making radical changes can be catalyzed by the desire to unveil untrodden aspects. This idea is discussed in Chan’s (2018) study of the Japanese queer manga translations of the Chinese classic The Journey to the West. The source text has been recontextualized and doctored to make room for the advancement of queer identity. The queering of the Chinese source text is realized through saturating it with salacious innuendos (Chan, 2018), which is quite the case in the queer performance of the Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony.

2. Methodology
   • Data of the Study

The source text is the painting entitled The Feast of the Gods by the seventeenth-century Golden Age Dutch artist Jan van Bijlert. The festive theme of the painting is described in the following:

The gods have assembled on Mount Olympus for a banquet to celebrate the marriage of Thetis and Peleus. On the left are Minerva, Diana, Mars and Venus accompanied by Cupid. Flora, the goddess of spring, stands behind them. Apollo, wearing his crown, and identifiable by his lyre, presides at the centre of the table. Further away, we can see Hercules with his club and Neptune with his trident. On the extreme right, Eris has placed the apple of disorder on the table. Certain gods are absent, hinted at by the presence of Juno’s peacock, probably because the canvas was cut away on the left-hand side. (Musée Magnin, n.d.-b, para. 1)

The target text is the queer performance that featured in the Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony directed by queer director Thomas Jolly. Many spectators condemned the queer performance for their belief that it mocked Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper painting which holds a sacred place in Christianity. It depicts the Christ having dinner with his twelve apostles before his crucifixion. The misunderstanding was cleared up when Musée Magnin (2024) in Dijon, France, posted on the social media X a picture of Jan van Bijlert’s painting The Feast of the Gods along with the question: “Ce tableau vous rappelle quelque chose?” (Does this painting remind you of something?) and a winking-face emoji. By dint of its inclusion of various forms of non-conforming gender identities, the term queer is chosen in the present study as the central term in the discussion of the intermedial translation of the painting into a performance.

• Analytical Framework

Greenall and Løfaldli (2019) developed an analytical framework that is premised on five levels of recontextualization to study multisemiotic works that encompass both verbal and non-verbal modes. The five levels of recontextualization are medial, generic, cultural, ideological, and linguistic. The authors make it clear that these levels are by no means exhaustive and that their relevance depends on the nature of the scrutinized data. They also explain that there is likely an overlap between these five levels.

Each medium has its own properties. When translation occurs between different mediums, medial recontextualization is bound to happen to tailor the source text to the target medium and its idiosyncrasies. Recontextualization can be manifested on the generic level when the genre of the source text is transformed into a new one. Cultural recontextualization is evident when the source text is adapted to the target audience’s cultural expectations or frame of reference. Recontextualization on the cultural level can involve “the invocation of an entirely new context in the meaning-generating process” (Greenall & Løfaldli, 2019, p. 248). As far as ideological recontextualization is concerned, it is a subcategory of and complementary to cultural recontextualization. Ideological recontextualization leads to the generation of certain “interpretive possibilities” and materializes “when a work is moved from one context to another, or is framed for reception by another national or international audience” (Greenall & Løfaldli, 2019, p. 249). Linguistic recontextualization is related to the transformations that occur on the verbal level.

The study attempts to explore the transformation of Jan van Bijlert’s painting into a queer performance in the Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony from the lens of intermedial translation. Recontextualization is employed as an analytical tool to examine the transformations that have taken place in the intermedial translation process in light of the five levels of recontextualization proposed by Greenall and Løfaldli (2019). Following Greenall and Løfaldli’s (2019) lead, cultural and ideological recontextualization is discussed under the same section given the interconnectedness of culture and ideology.

3. Analysis
   • Medial Recontextualization

The medium of the source text, the painting, is a canvas. This medium, which relies principally on the non-verbal visual mode, is transformed into a totally different medium, a stage performance. Performances are intrinsically multisemiotic, encompassing acoustic (e.g., music), kinesthetic (e.g., dances), visual (e.g., costumes and designs), and verbal (e.g., songs) modes. The outcome of the intermedial translation of the painting is a tableau vivant (a living painting) that comprises various modes of meaning-making. This act of crossing borders between two different mediums entails the reconstruction of meaning in a way that fits the peculiarities of the target medium.

Spectacularization is a significant mode of communication in the queer recontextualization of the painting. Figure 2 (the target text), taken from the Paris 2024 opening ceremony video posted by Olympics (2024) on YouTube, shows how the performers are dressed in vibrant colors and surrounded by disco-like lighting, which stands in sharp contrast to the earth tones color palette and the chiaroscuro technique (i.e., creating an artistic contrast between light and shade) Jan van Bijlert used in his painting as shown in Figure 1 (the source text). The medial recontextualization is undergirded by purposeful eroticization that is congruent with the queer creed. The dancers and performers, including drag queens who represent the phenomenon of cross-dressing, don risqué clothing and indulge in erotic dance movements. Engulfed in clamorous music and songs, the performance also features a fashion show that includes drag queens strutting the catwalk to further boost their visibility.

Among the deities depicted in the painting is Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and fertility who is also known as Bacchus. Given his association with wine and grapes, Dionysus is believed to wield power to “control a person’s state of mind, in the same way that alcohol does, and he is often connected to scenes of madness or various forms of wild behavior” (Houle, 2001, p. 76). In Jan van Bijlert’s painting, Dionysus is depicted at the bottom left side with his hands stretched upward and holding a grape cluster and with a dancing satyr near him. In the performance, however, Dionysus, played by French entertainer and singer Philippe Katerine, takes center stage (2:39:10) by entering the tableau on a large, colorful platter full of fruits and flowers, singing and dancing along with the ebullient, flamboyantly dressed ensemble behind him and the Seine River in the background. He is painted in blue, appearing semi-nude with nothing but grapes around his waist and atop his head in a nod to the deity of wine. In light of this Dionysian milieu, it is clear how transmediating the static source medium into a performative target medium involves spectacularization using razzmatazz, where gaudy costumes, erotic dances, glaring light effects, and rowdy music predominate. This throws into sharp relief the transformative potential of intermedial translation. 

Figure 1. Jan van Bijlert’s painting The Feast of the Gods in Musée Magnin

Figure 2. The queer tableau vivant in the Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony directed by Thomas Jolly (2:39:10)

• Generic Recontextualization

Jan van Bijlert is one of the eminent Utrecht Caravaggisti. His painting style is profoundly influenced by the Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Jan van Bijlert’s painting The Feast of the Gods is classified as a historical painting. This art genre depicts historical as well as mythological figures and is regarded as the most prestigious kind of art (National Gallery of Art, 2007). According to Musée Magnin (n.d.-a), Jan van Bijlert “disturbingly blends the iconography of myths with that of the Last Supper” (para. 5), which can explain the aforementioned worldwide vitriol and outrage triggered by the queer performance.

Refocusing is part of recontextualization. The mythological ambience of the painting is effaced when it is intermedially translated into a performance. The latter is anchored in the postmodern worldview that embraces the avant-garde. In art, the term “avant-garde” can be understood as “the demand that art move from representing to transforming the world” (Groys, 1992, p. 14, as cited in Warden, 2015, p. 5). It is the kind of art that deals a blow to “aesthetic ideas and societal structures” (Warden, 2015, p. 5). Regarding avant-gardism and its relation to the performance, President of Paris 2024, Tony Estanguet, describes the choice of queer director Thomas Jolly as being bold as it is congruous with the Paris 2024 vision that is founded on creating avant-garde ceremonies. He also praises the choice of Jolly by virtue of his unorthodox dramaturgical oeuvre:

For Paris 2024, appointing Thomas Jolly as artistic director of the ceremonies is an ambitious choice that is consistent with our vision. With his impressive career, Thomas Jolly is at the forefront of the young, creative and ambitious French artistic scene. His extraordinary shows are proof that he knows how to break norms and take them to the next level. Thomas Jolly will be able to imagine unprecedented artistic concepts for the Paris 2024 ceremonies. (as cited in Comité d’organisation des Jeux Olympiques et Paralympiques de Paris, 2022, p. 1)

This vision Estanguet outlines is imbued with the stratagem of flouting norms related to gender and sexuality in the name of artistic creativity. The notion of the translator’s agency is evident in the vast latitude enjoyed by the director-cum-translator in recontextualizing the genre of the painting when intermedially translating it into a performance that is tinged with hues of avant-gardism. The avant-garde strand of the performance lies in its experimentation and rebellion that are based on foregrounding heterodox gender identities in a debauchery-filled burlesque that uses all artistic means to destabilize standard notions pertaining to gender and sexual desire.

• Cultural and Ideological Recontextualization

The Dutch Golden Age in the seventeenth century is the time in which The Feast of the Gods came into being. During that time, Calvinism (also known as Reformed Protestantism) had a strong hold over the Netherlands. It is founded on the principle of predestination and the subversion of clerical authority (Haefeli, 2012). One of the fundamental tenets of Calvinism during the Golden Age is “the pursuit of a disciplined community and society” (Parker, 2018, p. 190), launching a fierce fight against “heterodoxy and social degradation” (p. 195). The Dutch Reformed Church played a vital role in “pressing moral discipline in everyday life” (Parker, 2018, p. 189). In light of this, it is clear how the cultural atmosphere in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century is substantially conservative and is profoundly informed by an urgency to police behaviors that do not meet the rigid moral code back then.

Studying translation cannot be divorced from the cultural context that gives rise to its creation. When relocated to a new signification system, the painting is culturally recontextualized. In the painting, it is all about festivity as the major theme is a wedding celebration that is attended by a bevy of Greek gods and goddesses. In the performance, however, festivity is interlaced with the call for freedom of expression. Nicky Doll, a well-known French drag queen, host of Drag Race France and one of the drag performers in the queer tableau, explains the reason behind the performance when Thomas Jolly approached them: “They reached out to me and said that they wanted to incorporate part of the nightlife of French culture in the last number. It was all about music and celebration and a big banquet and a big party” (as cited in Hickey, 2024, para. 3). The drag skit bespeaks “the French capital’s vibrant night life and reputation as a place of tolerance, pleasure and subversiveness” (McKenna, 2024, para. 6). The notion of “pleasure” brings up the French concept of “joie de vivre” which literally means the joy of living. The performance depicts France as the purveyor of boundless jollification and a haven for those yearning for breaking free from minoritization and carving a place for themselves in state-sponsored highbrow events. The source text is culturally recontextualized when it is transformed into a performance that unreservedly indulges in debauchery and eroticism as a token of the French culture that places too great a value on freedom of expression.

Cultural recontextualization is reflected in the aforementioned idea of “subversiveness” which resonates with the so-called woke culture. The term “woke” refers to “being aware of the society around you and speaking up for needed change or against perceived injustice” (Paulson, 2024, para. 1). Its use was initially confined to the context of advocating the rights of Black people in the United States, but then it evolved to cover awareness of other forms of discrimination not just on the base of race but also gender. The US is the cradle of woke culture; however, it has made its way to many countries in Europe, including France where it is commonly known as “le wokisme.” In his condemnation of the queer performance in the Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony, Shabi (2024) explains the evils of wokeism in the following:

woke politics and the mindset have turned our world upside down, and now, it’s being promoted everywhere it seems … drag queens are promoted as healthy entertainment our children should be exposed to, rather than being labeled as an embarrassment and an affront to nature itself. In your face, unnatural morality is showing up everywhere. (paras. 1-2)

Similarly, French member of the European Parliament Sarah Knafo decries the opening ceremony, describing it as “woke propaganda” (as cited in Wilde, 2024, para. 1). This woke propaganda indicates a sense of determination to orchestrate a performance that challenges conservative circles and endorses unorthodox cultural ideas. The performance is employed as a space for preaching the contentious woke culture. Cultural recontextualization thus materializes in the infiltration of aspects of wokeism into the painting when it is intermedially translated into a performance where the latter is supposedly designed to function as a statement of tolerance and acceptance that is concurrently fraught with moral qualms.

As mentioned earlier, Reformed Protestantism (Calvinism) thrived in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. At that time, the Dutch Reformed Church was the most powerful religious edifice (Parker, 2018). Jan van Bijlert painted The Feast of the Gods circa 1635-1640 after he had joined the Dutch Reformed Church in 1630. The ideological atmosphere surrounding the production of art in the Dutch Golden Age is explained in the following:

Prior to the Reformation, the majority of artistic commissions had been for Roman Catholic churches and devotional purposes. After the iconoclasm, however, painters had to adapt to an enormous drop in ecclesiastic patronage. They did so by experimenting with new forms of non-devotional art. (Vanhaelen, 2018, p. 240)

This shows how the theological changes ushered in by Calvinism triggered changes in art as well. In other words, painting pictures with ecclesiastical themes fell out of favor when Reformed Protestantism usurped Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age. That is why renowned Dutch painters, including Jan van Bijlert, turned to sundry forms of painting, such as mythological paintings, that mark a departure from the Catholic painting tradition.

Regarding the target text, the impetus for the queer-studded performance is to advance the queer agenda of visibility and inclusivity. The queer ideology underpinning the controversial tableau is voiced indirectly by Hugo Bardin, one of the drag queens who participated in the performance:

As a gay youth growing up in central France, Hugo Bardin never felt he lived in a world that represented who he was—a world in which he had a place. And that is why Bardin, who performs as the drag queen Paloma, felt it was meaningful and important to be part of a Paris Olympics opening ceremony that presented a multifaceted, multiethnic France with people of different ethnicities and orientations. (as cited in Noveck, 2024, paras. 1-2)

In response to the vituperative comments lashed out at the tableau given its resemblance to Leonardo da Vinci’s highly revered The Last Supper painting, Thomas Jolly explains that the main idea behind this performance is to “have a big pagan party linked to the gods of Olympus, Olympian, Olympianism … You’ll never find in me any kind of wish to mock, to denigrate anything at all. I wanted a ceremony that repairs and reconciles” (as cited in Henley, 2024, para. 8). Jolly gives more insights into the message underlying the performance in the following:

This ceremony is political, just like I am, in the Greek sense of the word ‘polis’, the city, the continent, the world … There is no desire to be subversive or to offend but to say, we are this large ‘We’ with Republican ideas of inclusion, generosity, solidarity that we all are craving so much right now. Here, artistic creativity is free, we have this freedom. There is no desire to send militant messages but republican ones: in France, we have the right to love who we want and as we want, we have the right to believe or not to believe. The idea was to show those values. (as cited in Gambade, 2024, paras. 36-37)

Jolly emphasizes that the performance is designed to convey a particular political message centered on freedom of expression, faith, and sexual orientation. The iterative use of the personal pronoun “we” reinforces the sense of solidarity with the queer community as well as the rising number of individuals who adopt non-conformist gender identities. Despite the controversy surrounding the performance, its queerness is hailed by prominent figures in the sphere of queer activism, including James Leperlier, president of Inter-LGBT (L’Interassociative Lesbienne, Gaie, Bi et Trans/The Lesbian, Gay, Bi and Trans Association) in France:

We know in the LGBTQ community in France we are far from what the ceremony showed. There’s much progress to do in society regarding transgender people … If you saw the opening ceremony last night you’d think it was like that normally, but it’s not. France tried to show what it should be and not what it is. (as cited in Adamson, 2024, paras. 15-17)

Leperlier laments the challenges facing the LGBTQ community in France in making their voices heard, lauding the opportunity given to the inclusion of queer figures in the opening ceremony. This further sheds light on how the performance is deliberately deployed to propagate the queer cause that calls for representation and inclusion.

Concerning the ideological shifts between the source and target mediums, the deities portrayed in Jan van Bijlert’s painting are replaced by queer figures. One of these deities is Apollo. He is among the gods who are held in high esteem in Greek mythology. He is the god of the sun, art, music, healing, and divination (Roman & Roman, 2010). In Jan van Bijlert’s painting, Apollo is painted at the center of the banquet with a lyre in his hand and a halo over his head. In the Olympic bacchanal opening, Leslie Barbara Butch, a French disc jockey known for her lesbian activism and body positivism, takes Apollo’s central place. She wears a glittery blue dress with a halo-like headpiece. Apollo’s lyre is changed to a DJ mixing board to suit the new cabaret-like medium. Transvestism, which is manifested in the presence of drag queens in the queer performance, is instrumentalized to challenge the traditional gender binarism and enforce an alternative gender spectrum. The other deities in the painting surrounding Apollo (Figure 2), such as those on the left side including Minerva (the goddess of wisdom and war), Diana (the goddess of hunting and the moon), Mars (the god of war), Venus (the goddess of love), Flora (the goddess of spring) and the right side including Hercules (a highly revered divine Greek hero), Neptune (the god of sea), and Eris (the goddess of strife and discord) are replaced by famous drag queens. Among these drag queens are Hugh Bardin (the one wearing an orange wig and flower-embellished dress) and Piche (the bearded drag queen scantily clothed in blue) on the right as well as Nicky Doll (the redhead sporting a metallic suit) on the left. They pose behind the table like the original figures in the wedding celebration featured in the painting and parading their deviant gender identities as shown in Figure 3:

Figure 3. Leslie Barbara Butch in the center of the tableau vivant doing a heart hand gesture and flanked by drag queens (1:55:25)

The umbilical connection between queer activism, visibility, and nonconformity materializes in the performance. The painting is invested with an activist timbre when it is transposed into a performance; it caters to the queer ideology of endorsing those who adopt non-conforming gender identities and sexual orientations. The iconography of the original painting is ideologically recontextualized and transformed into a performance that is interspersed with explicit appeals to inclusivity. The replacement of the pantheon of Greek deities and heroes with queer figures can be construed as a political and activist attempt to lend legitimacy to the inclusion of queer figures on a global stage. The foregrounding of the ideological dimension of the queer performance underscores the leverage of the intermedial translation to push forward France’s queer agenda. France is, in fact, one of the staunch advocates of the rights of the queer community, and “in 2019, France was ranked 3rd among OECD countries in terms of LGBT-inclusive laws” (Ministry for Gender Equality, Diversity and Equal Opportunities, 2020, p. 11). The queering of the painting is a translation strategy that amounts to an ideological statement of solidarity with the queer fight for representation. The performance buttresses France’s efforts to normalize queerness. It is systematically aligned with France’s commitment to the legitimation of the inclusion of the queer community and the intense heightening of the visibility of its members.

• Linguistic Recontextualization

As previously mentioned, the principal mode of communication in the original painting is the non-verbal visual mode. There is, however, a verbal aspect not in the painting itself but rather its paratext, namely its title. The title of Jan van Bijlert’s painting is The Feast of the Gods. The title of the queer performance, the eighth sequence of the Olympics opening ceremony, is Festivité (Festivity), which is close to the original title. However, there is an additional verbal queer nuance that is furthered by the flesh-flashing performance of a song entitled Nu (naked) (2:39:13) by Katerine (2024), known as the naked blue guy who plays Dionysus, the Greek god of wine. The YouTube-generated original lyrics and their English translation are provided in Table 1:

Table 1. French lyrics of Philippe Katerine’s song Nu and their English translation (0:47)

This song is the pièce de résistance of the queer tableau. The raison d’être of including this song in the opening ceremony is summed up by Katerine: “I wanted to get my message across, which goes something like this: If you’re naked, there’s no war because there are no weapons” (as cited in Hervieux, 2024, para. 8). Including a song that advocates nudity is in line with the immense significance attached to corporeality and exhibitionism in the queer-centric discourse. They are employed in queer activism to acknowledge difference and visibility. Moreover, adding this song that praises the virtues of nudity and erotic freedom in the performance conduces to sending a tongue-in-cheek message promulgated by the queer community vis-à-vis the liberation of the body from the conventional gender dualism where only males and females are the accepted genders.

Conclusion

By adopting the perspective of intermedial translation, it is shown how Jan van Bijlert’s painting The Feast of the Gods, the source text, underwent transformation and experimentation when it was relocated to the new medium of the queer-studded performance in the Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony, the target text. The queering that took place is scrutinized through the five levels of recontextualization, namely medial, generic, cultural, ideological, and linguistic. The static medium of the painting is changed to a multisemiotic medium where meaning is communicated visually through the display of garish fashion and glaring lighting, acoustically through clamorous music, as well as kinesthetically through erotic dances, ultimately creating a razzle-dazzle spectacle that bolsters the queer message of visibility. An avant-garde tenor takes over the mythological genre of the painting, resulting in a performance that is firmly grounded in the postmodern logic of plurality and is laden with subversive overtones concerning gender norms. The conservative cultural context in which the painting was created is reworked into a context that embraces the French culture of joie de vivre and caters to wokeism that is brimmed with moral scruples given the unbridled freedom of contesting gender norms. The painting is ideologically recontextualized as in the bustle of the performance there lies a full-fledged queer message that hinges on the imperative of inclusivity and representation of the queer community. The performance constitutes a stand against setting heteronormativity and cisnormativity as the norm in sexuality. This is realized through the replacement of the Greek deities and heroes featured in the painting with queer and drag figures, advocating the queer-centric view that defies gender binarism and promotes the malleability of gender identities. Linguistic recontextualization lies in the addition of a song that commends nudity by a semi-naked singer. The emphasis laid on nudity resonates with the centrality of corporeality to queer thought. The analysis conducted on the five levels of recontextualization demonstrates how the intermedial translation of the painting into a performance is employed as a conduit for the advancement of the queer agenda of visibility and inclusivity.