The printed Olympia program points to excess, a flooding or distraction of the senses. In the risqué framing of the program with photo cut outs of scantily clad women’s bodies, and the language (one French singer is framed as having the “figure of a pin up girl”) of sexualized objectification for the pleasure of the gaze, there is something vestigial of the Moulin Rouge or of the Olympia’s earlier (1893-1920s) history (“with their sequined, feathered, and bare-breasted dancing girls.” The Olympia, when it re-opens in 1954 under the management of Bruno Coquatrix as a music hall, is a kind of variety act pleasure house of performance, where one form of consumption (for example, the live musical performance) prompts other forms of pleasure wrought through consumption (the pleasure of ownership of a recording, the pleasure of being cosmopolitan, the pleasure of listening as a cosmopolitan, the pleasure of being in the know about the latest musical trends, the pleasure of tourism). Listening to the periphery is framed in this context as a form of cosmopolitanism. At the same time, local specificity regarding this periphery is omitted (but rather referenced with stereotypes). In addition to the radical juxtaposition of performance forms, there is also the juxtaposition, combination, and inclusion of a multiplicity of places or nations as referenced through performers, who sometimes stand in as their icons. In the midst of this excess of variety, in between acts by aerial acrobats and by dancers, coming right after the acrobats Les Akeff, and followed by the dance duo Darvas and Julia, is Amália Rodrigues in her Paris Olympia debut. She is thirty-five years old.
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