Great Bend native Bryan Pinkall is attending another Olympics, this time in Brazil.
In 2014, Pinkall, a voice instructor at Kansas State University’s School of Music, Theatre and Dance in Manhattan, was selected to join a team of 5,000 performers, artists and organizers to produce the opening ceremony production of the XXII Olympic Winter Games 2014 in Sochi, Russia.
Last week, Pinkall posted on his blog, “Bryan Pinkall’s World of Opera, Olympics, and More,” (http://bryanpinkall.blogspot.com/2016) that he had joined the performance operations team for the next Olympic Games Ceremony and was in “the Copacabana bairro of beautiful Rio de Janeiro.” He said he is looking forward to the ceremonies, “which will be incredible,” and encouraged everyone to watch them on the evening of Aug. 5.
“Many people are already incorrectly calling these games the ‘Summer Olympics,’” Pinkall noted. “Instead, the correct name for the Rio 2016 Olympics is rather archaic, ‘The Games of the XXXI (thirty-first) Olympiad,’ but they’re called this for good reason. It is currently WINTER in Rio. Since the seasons of the Southern Hemisphere are opposite of the Northern Hemisphere, it makes it very confusing for everyone down here when you see ‘Summer Olympics’ on a commercial.”
On Saturday he reported that plans for the show were full steam ahead.
“Everything is going so well, it’s scaring me!” he wrote. “For example, in Sochi, it took me almost 30 hours to get my credentials. Here in Rio, I merely waited in line and within 2 minutes I received my accreditation.”
On Sunday Pinkall posed for a photo with the famous “Christ the Redeemer” statute in the background. He wrote, “By population, Brazil is the largest Catholic country in the world. Obviously, we cannot tell the story of Brazil without talking about Catholicism, and we can’t tell the story of Rio without Christ the Redeemer. These turn out to be major artistic points in the ceremony – and in a very exciting and beautiful way. Tomorrow, we are making a stop at the nearby downtown cathedral, one of the world’s largest, for some final planning before a week of practice runs leading up to the first dress rehearsals.”