Jeff Heuchert
Staff Reporter

A creative mind behind the Stratford Shakespeare Festival for years has now left his mark on one of the grandest stages of all.

This past weekend, Stratford’s Doug Paraschuk wrapped up his duties as director of design for the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games, where he was part of the creative team responsible for the opening and closing ceremonies, as well as the nightly medal presentations.

It’s as big a task the freelance designer, who spent 22 years with the Festival as design coordinator and has worked on countless projects around the world, including the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2006 Asian Games, has ever assumed.

Not to mention nerve-racking.

“It was a heck of a lot easier, I must say, doing this for another country ... when it’s your own country it’s loaded with all kinds of stress,” said Paraschuk, who spoke with the Gazette last Wednesday morning from BC Place, shortly after running through a rehearsal for the closing ceremonies.

“It’s been a huge commitment and an epic task just trying to make everything work from a logistical, engineering and design point of view,” he added.

Paraschuk managed a small team of designers, who worked alongside artistic directors and choreographers to develop the  ceremonies’ memorable scenes – images that were watched by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

His work actually began long before the world turned its attention to Vancouver. Preparation on the ceremonies began back in 2008. Paraschuk had been living predominantly on the west coast since early 2009.

“It got really intense over the last year,” he said, adding watching the nightly award presentations has been the closest he’s gotten to taking in the Olympics from purely a fan’s point of view.

“Other than being out on the streets of Vancouver at night when there’s half a million partyers, I don’t really get to take in much of the games,” he noted, adding he spends 12 hours a day inside BC Place, either rehearsing the closing ceremonies or setting up the victory plaza for the night’s award presentations.

While details of the closing ceremonies remained a guarded secret at the time he spoke with the Gazette, Paraschuk said it would be a “completely different temperature” than the opening ceremonies.

“It’s the end of the games, all of the athletes will come out together, not as nations but as a mass grouping of people, and it’s a celebration,” he said.  

As for the opening ceremonies,  the first to ever be held indoors, Paraschuk said much time was spent getting input from Canadians to find what they felt was the “Canadian story” that should be told.

“What we tried to tap into, more than anything, was the sense of the spirit of the county, as opposed to any factual representation,” he explained.

“And we also tried to provide a sense of the human scale, because that’s part of the Canadian psyche ... the individual versus the vastness of what this country is was at the heart of everything.”

The ceremonies paid tribute to the country’s heritage, culture and landscape. One segment, which depicted the northern lights, was special to Paraschuk.

“It was something I really tried to champion,” he said.

Two other Stratford-based artists also helped with the opening ceremonies, Paraschuk noted. John Pennoyer, who has worked with the Stratford Festival, designed  and made some of the costumes used in the first segment; and Frank Holte, the former head of props for the Festival, helped design the crystal content for the cauldron.

Despite staging the ceremonies in BC Place, which Paraschuk noted can be a “inhospitable environment to stage a show in” due to its sheer size, the ceremonies went off without any major hitch – the only hiccup coming at the end of the opening ceremonies when one arm of the Olympic cauldron failed to rise from the floor (which organizers corrected during a humorous opening to the closing ceremonies).

“The cauldron was one of those moments where you heart stops,” he recalled, mustering a laugh. “But you know what, it’s the reality of doing a live show.”

The culprit was a $20 encoder, which Paraschuk said malfunctioned, failing to send a signal to open the door in the floor. He said crews worked to try to open the door, but decided to move on once they felt too much time had passed.

That moment aside, Paraschuk said the experience of working on an Olympics has been extremely rewarding, though he noted completing any project – big or small – comes with a great sense of satisfaction.

“You gauge each differently as far as a reward, but this would be right up there,” he noted.

“Without question it has been the most stressful, biggest and logistically the most complex ... (but) I would have really regretted not taking the task on.”