LONDON
When Ajay Chhabra was asked to design a pageant performance to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee, he knew what would make the perfect centerpiece: cake.
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Not just any cake, but Elizabeth and Prince Philip’s 1947 wedding cake. The four-tier, nine-foot (2.7-meter) confection was dubbed “the 10,000-mile cake” at the time because it was whipped up with sugar, dried fruit, rum and brandy from all corners of the Commonwealth, from South Africa to the Caribbean to Australia and the South Pacific.
Chhabra, a second-generation British Indian with Fijian heritage, wanted to use his segment of Sunday’s Jubilee pageant to highlight how the queen, through her historic 70 years on the throne, united generations of Commonwealth citizens from places as far flung as Fiji.
“We’re not recreating the 1947 wedding of the queen, but creating a sort of homage to it, with all the people and all the diversity that Britain has produced,” he said.
On Sunday, more than 200 performers in vibrant saris will dance to Bollywood tunes around a moving, six-meter-tall (20-foot-tall) version of the queen’s wedding cake, powered by a hidden electric vehicle. Its top tier, featuring a rendition of the queen’s beloved corgis holding aloft a crown, pops up and down on a hydraulic system.
