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The opening ceremony for the London 2012 Paralympics is called Enlightenment and will feature a host of deaf and disabled artists, local children and performers newly trained in circus skills.
Injured soldiers and past Paralympic athletes are among the cast who are starting an eight-week circus school course.
A flypast by Aerobility, a charity that trains disabled people to become pilots, will open the 29 August event at the Olympic Stadium.
It also sets out to be a celebration of the Paralympics coming home as the event originated in the UK as the Stoke Mandeville Games in 1948.
Organisers say another batch of tickets will go on sale later this month, including some for the opening ceremony.
London 2012 claims the number of tickets already sold is "unprecedented" this far ahead of the Paralympics. That may be true but in Beijing tickets were not being sold at this stage.
More than a million tickets have already been sold for London. The total number sold in Beijing was 3.44 million although almost half of those were bought by the government and given to school children.
A spokesman for the International Paralympic Committee told Channel 4 News that because of the size of the venues in Beijing the audience numbers were unlikely to ever be beaten but he was hopeful that the London 2012 Paralympics would be a sell out at around 2.4 million.
It is also hoped the London Paralympic games will reach the largest television audience of around 4 billion people compared to Beijing which reached around 3.8 billion.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
