If the widely-accepted speculation is to be believed, Céline Dion will this weekend return to the stage during the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics. It will be the first time she’s performed since her Courage world tour was cut short due to the pandemic in 2020, a necessary hiatus that encouraged Dion to reckon with the mysterious health concerns that had been a recurrent part of her life since 2008. This summer’s Prime Video documentary—I Am: Céline Dion—lifted the veil on the musician’s resilient and tenacious battle with stiff-person syndrome and her remarkable efforts to sing once more.
Dion was yesterday afternoon photographed exiting the Royal Monceau Hotel in the 8th Arrondissement where Lady Gaga, who is also rumored to be headlining, is also lodged. Hair slung into a low pony, Dion appeared in outsized tailoring—the wide collars of a men’s shirt fanning across the lapels on a wide-shouldered and wide-legged suit—as if to channel the embattled maestro Cate Blanchett played in Todd Field’s Tár, whose made-to-measure Egon Brandstetter suits spoke to determination, perfection, control. “I’m going to go back onstage,” Dion said in an interview with NBC last month. “Even if I have to crawl. Even if I have to talk with my hands. I will,” she added. “I will.”
Though specific details surrounding this weekend’s performances have been kept under lock and key—so much so that director Thomas Jolly has been unable to rehearse in situ—Paris’s opening extravaganza promises to be the most ambitious ceremony in Olympic history. The event will make use of the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Palais and 200 boats, some of which will transport a procession of athletes along the Seine, which has necessitated the installation of a wastewater tank that organisers have compared to the building of Notre-Dame. “This project is so gigantic that I can either panic straight away and collapse right here in front of you, or I can learn to preserve a kind of distance and do things steadily,” Jolly told Gaby Wood of his plans, citing the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca: “It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that things are difficult.” I think that quote could just as feasibly be applied to Céline Dion.