REST AND REHEARSAL: Performers taking breaks or practising in front of Beijing's National Stadium during Wednesday's dress rehearsal. The ceremony to mark the opening of the XXIX Olympiad next Friday is expected to be dazzling. -- PHOTOS: REUTERS, AFP, XINHUA

View more photos

Glimpses of next week's opening ceremony have been revealed - after a South Korean television station broadcast clips of the dress rehearsal on its network yesterday.

The clip is now available on YouTube.

In a breach of China's fearsome security apparatus, a South Korean TV journalist was able to walk straight into the National Stadium, dubbed the Bird's Nest, and film long sections of the rehearsal.

The results (picture two) were shown on his network, SBS, and the video was later put on the Internet by News Limited, an Australian media group.

The South Korean TV station said yesterday it shot the footage legitimately.

The broadcast by the private SBS network has irked Chinese organisers who had, according to state media, made performers sign confidentiality agreements not to divulge details of next Friday's ceremony.

Internet users in China likened it to breaking state secrecy laws.

'I find it very disappointing that any organisation would breach protocol on something as exciting as an opening ceremony, where it's supposed to be one of the big surprises of the Games outside of athletic performance,' IOC press chief Kevan Gosper said yesterday.

'It's also the spirit of it, they know very well it should be kept private.'

The network, one of three South Korean TV rights holders allowed to distribute Olympic footage, aired just over a minute of video of the closed-door rehearsal.

It included scenes depicting the past and future of Chinese culture and the unrolling of a huge scroll from which rises a carpet-like object.

'We went and nobody stopped us. So we just shot,' a staff reporter at SBS' sports desk said in Seoul.

SBS did not show the lighting of the Olympic torch at the National Stadium, where the rehearsal was taking place.

But it reported that a golden phoenix was expected to swoop down into the stadium for the event.

A spokesman for the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) said that reporters had been told not to take footage of the rehearsal and that the matter was being investigated.

'At the beginning of the rehearsal, they made a broadcast saying that nobody is supposed to take any pictures,' BOCOG spokesman Sun Weide told reporters.

'Of course, I don't think it's authorised. We are still looking into the details of the situation.'

But it was not the first sight the public had been given of what promises to be a spectacular display: There was no disguising the fireworks display that lit up the night sky of the Chinese capital last week during another rehearsal, reported The Daily Telegraph.

China, like previous Games hosts, has taken great pains to keep the content of its opening ceremony as secret as possible.

The ceremony, directed by Oscar nominee Zhang Yimou, is expected to dazzle the world.

More than 10,000 performers, according to state media, are involved in the ceremony, which organisers have been working on for three years.

The show starts with dancers performing a countdown, accompanied by a roll of drums. A huge scroll unravels, to reveal three dancers.

At various points, trapeze artistes hover above the throng, while ethereal whales and animals are projected on to the interior lip of the lattice-work steel stadium.

In perhaps the most impressive footage, serried ranks of performers dressed in huge boxes rise and fall in what appears to be a visualisation of the continuous building of skyscraper blocks that is China's current cultural master achievement, reported The Telegraph.

REUTERS