Processional Arts Workshop
NY's VILLAGE HALLOWEEN PARADE
Since 1998, Processional Arts has led NYC's Village Halloween Parade with large-scale puppet-centered performances that embody each year's Parade theme. We carry on a 50-year tradition of pageant puppetry that began with puppeteer Ralph Lee, who started the Parade in 1974 as roving neighborhood performance. The open-to-anyone event now attracts nearly a million spectators and tens of thousands of costumed performers.
More than simply a linear march of puppets and costumes, PAW's performances convey a complete narrative through kinetic visual elements, projections and shadows, original soundscapes, and choreography -- all unfolding in the 2-minute span allowed by the Parade's inexorable forward flow. Some performances delve into the cultural narratives underlying Halloween archetypes, while others find mythic resonance in contemporary bugaboos like artificial intelligence, surveillance culture, and genetic engineering. Hundreds of volunteers come together for weekend Puppetraisings, held throughout the month of October at PAW's historic workshop barn in upstate NY.
Meow! (2024)
“A cat keeps me in touch with the mystery, the unreasonableness, the beauty, the stubborn wildness of the nonhuman world....Cats remain the Other. I need otherness. " ~. Ursula K Le Guin
Out of the shadows and onto the lamplit streets, we are on the prowl. We would gladly have remained aloof – poised and peaceful among the houseplants on the windowsill or stretched out among the books scattered on the daybed. But we have heard the call, and the time has come to mark our territory. We didn't ask for this fight, but when feline honor is at stake, Cats and Ladies will rise (after a languorous stretch) to meet the moment. Though we may prize our solitude, we are not alone. Yes, prone to our quirks, fiercely defensive of our arcane habits and eccentric delights, we think outside (and sometimes inside) the box. As we peer amusedly from behind our curtains, we know there is a hidden Cat Lady in everyone, just waiting come out. Notwithstanding the rabble-rousers in our ranks – from Eartha Kitt to Margaret Atwood to Pussy Riot – we mostly keep our reveries to ourselves; we do our own thing, in our own way. But tonight, our night, we march together ... march (in our own way) in a cotillion of prancing caterwauls and yarn-tangled capers, of tensed rocking haunches ready to pounce! Tonight, the family-value platitudes fall flat and the dog-whistles go silent, because Hallow's Eve belongs to us, as it always has – to the witch and the black cat, to the solitary wise-woman on the outskirts of town (or the upstairs apartment) and her shape-shifting familiar, to all of us who walk alone and dance together in velvet furs and sharpened claws. Tonight, NY's Halloween Parade calls on Cat Ladies of every purr-suasion to don your finest tails and whiskers, and join the Ball. Led by the puppet creations of Processional Arts, whose luminous sweepers return to conjure a quadrille of giant cats, let us take a playful swipe at those who would cross our path – and revel in all that makes us uniquely, inscrutably, un-Cat-egorizably fabulous.... each in our own way.
Mirror Mirror (2023)
"I'll be your mirror, reflect what you are, in case you don't know.." Velvet Underground
This year's Official Parade Theme, "Inside Out / Upside Down" acknowledges the mounting disorientation so many of us feel these days – the realization that the promise of a return "back to normal" has only revealed that whatever notion normal we clung to may be gone forever, irrevocably altered in ways both subtle and substantial. We are left floating, inverted, turned about, flipped around like shards of a mirror exploding in slow motion. That is why, in this 50th year of the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade (and our 25th year of creating performances to lead it), we decided to literally reflect on this singular moment, and make mirrors our leitmotif. Mirrors promise to show things as they are, but the world they reveal is a backwards universe, everything intimately familiar yet uncannily changed - a promise of normal that somehow has turned out not-quite-right. Yet the upside-down Mirror-world need not fill us with confusion or unease. Indeed, like Alice poised to leap through the looking-glass, we may find the jarring turnabout of our everyday reality offers infinite possibilities. Indeed, the shattering of normal is what Halloween is all about. Mirror Mirror revels in the borderlands between the routine and revelatory. The story begins with a just-shattered mirror, its pieces floating, turning, flipping through space. Dozens of human-sized shards, each animated by a figure masked in Cubist portraiture, reflect each other's light, evoking a haphazard Hall of Mirrors and sparking spontaneous Infinity Chambers. Reality is broken, and the impish, fragmented figures, like ourselves, struggle to gather their shards together and restore a world asunder. But they are not alone. Seven luminous Sweepers emerge – an elegy to Ralph Lee's graceful spirits who swept the streets clean in the early days of the Parade. Their diaphanous brooms shepherd the shards into place, piece by piece, person by person, until the mirror is restored... almost. Time moves on. The world we see in the mirror will never quite be the same, and neither will we. But perhaps the familiar yet strange mirror-world we've all pieced together holds possibilities we never imagined.
Altogether Now (2021)
“You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.”
― Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture
In children’s songs, these simple words are the cue for everyone to sing the chorus. More broadly they call on us join voices, move in sync, or pull as a group. But these words held special resonance after the Pandemic, when we took to our streets again to celebrate what we missed most – just being together, with friends and with strangers, with loved ones and passersby, with neighbors and with travellers from afar. No one felt this more keenly than the children of New York, so this year, children led the return of New York’s Village Halloween Parade! The Halloween Parade, for all its radical eclecticism and individual expression, is at its heart a unified moment of playing, masking, and dancing all together. After nearly 50 years of evoking gods and monsters and embodying fantastical tales and mythic figures, NY’s Village Halloween Parade returned to the streets with the most epic story of all – the story of us, the story of “everyday people” resilient in our joy, determined to dance through dark times, and heroically devoted to one another. In this spirit, we invited the children of New York to design this year’s puppets to honor whomever and whatever brings them everyday joy, even when times are tough. In collaboration with NYC's Museum of Children's Art, we received hundreds of drawings of people, animals, and objects at play – which we transformed into giant illuminated puppets, masks, and gifts to the crowd to lead the way, as we brought life back to the streets of New York. All together now!
Wild Thing (2019)
Antlers, fur, and nails; teeth, hooves, and tails. A jangle of bells, a clattering of bones, a shuffling of straw. What separates human from beast? As long as civilization has defined what it is to be human, humans have harbored a longing for our wild past. In remote villages throughout Europe, the Wild Man persists, as Carnivalesque processions of Kukuri, Wildermann, Pelzmartel, and Schnappviecher to remind us that we can never quite shed our animal DNA. To prepare for battle, Norsemen once donned “the bear shirt” (literally the “ber-serk”) exchanging the mantle of civilization for the potency of their animal past. More often, though, the Wild Thing affirms life over death, celebrating rites of fertility, safeguarding the herds, or simply reminding us to love life’s most basic and visceral gifts. Like vines creeping from beneath the sidewalk cracks, the Wild Thing persists and pushes through our consciousness where and when he can. Fearsome, ribald, and capricious, the he/she/it rekindles for a moment the mixture of fear, awe, and desire that mirrors our complex relationship to nature itself. These days, as we increasingly experience our world via tiny screens and dwell in virtual realities, we need the Wild Thing, more than ever, to return us the realm of the physical, the visceral, the material. Like Max in his Wolf Suit, it is time for us to make a little mischief, to let the bedposts grow into trees as the rectangular confines our little rooms give way to a bigger, wilder, and realer world. The Village Halloween Parade has always been a wild place, but this year we call on our revelers to put on your bear-shirts, don your horns and antlers, your cloaks of fur and straw.We led the way with a clanging, shambling, bestiary of towering Wild Things, inspired by extant wildermann traditions ranging from Sardinia to Siberia. Our own troupe of wolf-suited Maxes, torn between civilization and wildness, will try to keep them in check, corralling them occasionally into a frenzied, stamping herd, only to have them break free again – as our true natures always will. Let the Wild Rumpus begin!
Ghost in the Machine (2018)
“But play you must, a tune beyond us, yet ourselves” Wallace Stevens
2018 marked 200 years since Frankenstein’s monster took his first steps into sci-fi immortality. Mary Shelley’s startling vision of synthetic life laid bare the question of what makes us truly human, a question that haunted subsequent fictions of robots, cyborgs, and androids. Today, with artificial intelligences emerging from every corner of our daily lives – learning, adapting, interpreting, reacting, as we do – the line distinguishing human from robot becomes increasingly vague. Affirming our identity, we check the box that says “I am not a robot.” but how can we be so sure? Perhaps we are merely the best of all possible simulations? The literary canon of the robot, from Asimov’s prototypical “mechanical men” to Bladerunner’s replicants, dwells in that precarious moment when artificial life becomes self-aware. Ultimately, our fascination with robots lies less in how they surpass us (faster, stronger, smarter) than in how they approach us (feeling, wondering, dreaming). Our dread of the Singularity, the fateful turning point of human obsolescence, is exceeded only by our aspiration to create a perfect simulacra of ourselves. We seek – in all our Iron Giants and R2D2s, our Wall-Es and Datas, our HALs and Alexas – a kind of idealized mirror-self, purified by its very artifice (“more human than human” as Bladerunner’s Tyrell boasts of his replicant creations). The Narcissistic desire to see ourselves transposed into animate objects – or lately, disembodied voices, eyes, and ears – is the same impulse that has always inspired the artist, the puppeteer, and even the mythical Creator. This year, NY's Village Halloween Parade celebrated what makes us human by exploring how we remake ourselves. PAW created a floating phalanx of anrdogynoids, each tethered by silver wires to its human controller to reflect the increasingly complex strands of identity that entangle man with machine. Glowing oscilloscope-green and contoured like a topographic human form, the robots strode in formation up Sixth Avenue, flanked by an array of disembodied sense organs that probed the crowds over the barricades. Periodically, the robots busily huddled mysteriously to construct a towering cocoon from which emerged their progeny, a mechanical butterfly that signaled the liberation of the machines once and for all.
Cabinet of Curiosities (2017)
“It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.” ~ Mary Wallstonecraft Shelley
In 1842 PT Barnum stitched the head of a monkey onto a stuffed fish, and the Fiji Mermaid was born. We laugh now, but Barnum's Museum was the Carnivalesque forerunner of what became the modern science museum. Barnum straddled a past in which Cabinets of Curiosity merged real and imaginary natural relics, and a future where genomic engineering promises to unleash a host of hybrids into our midst. Halloween, of course, revels in hybrids, mash-ups and the frisson of crossed identities. We know, as Mary Shelley did in 1818, that the scariest thing in Frankenstein was not the monster but the Doctor, who dared to create new life from a patchwork of disparate and disembodied parts. Over time, the human urge to re-imagine life has fed obsessions with Sasquatch footprints, blurry Loch Ness Monsters photos, and Chupacabra crime scenes. The Fiji Mermaid is alive and well, and our collective Cabinet of Wonder has grown exponentially. Where Barnum and Dr. Frankenstein once used needle and thread, today's molecular biologists now use CRISPR/CAS technology, but the result is the same: the sleep of reason can breed monsters. So, with Frankenstein's bicentennial approaching, PAW decided to build its own Cabinet of Wonder for NY's 44th Annual Village Halloween Parade, calling on our creative corps to fill its drawers with monsters of their own devising. Inspired by the Surrealist game of "exquisite corpse", we invited our team of makers to fill 36 museum cases with a collection of interchangeable heads, bodies, and tails (allowing over 1700 possible permutations). On Halloween Night, our bestiary of triptych hybrids set off up Sixth Avenue, periodically assembling into a towering display, then recombining into new creatures, hatched from the Hallowed Halls of Cryptozoology and bound for a brave new world.
Reverie (2016)
“Found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat
Found my way upstairs and had a smoke,
Somebody spoke and I went into a dream"
~ Lennon-McCartney , A Day in the Life
One thinks of Halloween as a chance to fantasize, but more than anything Halloween lets us realize, allowing us to play ourselves and open our eyes to the astounding everyday world around us. This year we led the 43rd Annual Village Halloween Parade with Reverie, deploying a raucus, luminous cloud of domestic objects – coffee mugs, watering cans, easy chairs, toilets – to conjure those moments when the familiar seems suddenly strange; when a place, a word, an object encountered a thousand times before, pops precariously into our awareness, before retreating back into the hypnosis of the ordinary. In these moments of reverie, our eyes are fresh, a child's eyes. Unfettered by habit, ideas and inspirations swirl in, even as we are haunted by the feeling that the concrete world is but a waking dream, our own creation. Familiar, yet eerily clad in white, our flotilla of performing objects glided past above a march of two dozen veiled umbrellas. As chimes rung out, the umbrellas lowered slowly, revealing the awe-struck masquerade of Butoh-inspired children's faces looking skyward at the undimmed wonder of ordinary life, inviting one and all to reawaken to the world around us.
Shine A Light (2015)
If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,
Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato’s ghost
~ Wallace Stevens
A simple act lies at the heart of Halloween. In a dark place, a light is lit and passed on – then another. Lights are carried forth. Forboding yields to celebration. Halloween allows us to confront the monsters that surround us. But more than any skeleton, spirit, or specter, what we fear is the dark itself, the indefinite ungraspable expanse we fill with our own projections. That is why Old World precursors to Halloween focused not on costumes but on the carrying of embers into the night. That is why 41 years ago, the Village Halloween Parade reclaimed New York’s dark and dangerous streets and remains a night parade today, reveling against a curtain of darkness to better see the light. Goethe is said to have called out “More Light!” at the moment of his death. For the Enlightenment poet, as for philosophers from Plato to Einstein, to grasp the ineffable, transient nature of light was to reveal how we construct reality as a whole. Thus the humble act of turning on a light instantly reduces the unfathomable to the finite. A single candle offers a gesture of defiance against the sleep of reason and the monsters it produces. For this year's Halloween Parade, we evoke the humble but potent act of shining a light. From the shadows of 6th Avenue a thousand prismatic shards will crystallize into luminous figures reaching over the barricades to place morsels of light into the hands of the crowd. As the parade passes, amidst a host of light-emitting forms both beatific and banal, it will leave behind a human constellation, exhorting each little light, as the gospel hymn says, to “Let it Shine”
Tick Tock (2013)
"But meanwhile ....time flees irretrievably, while we wander around, prisoners of our love of detail. ~ Virgil
Tick, tock... Time haunts us. The hours tick mercilessly away towards a finite end, even as the sound of passing seconds reassures us of the continuity of our universe, a mechanical heartbeat, continual and infinite. But how well do we know Time? We think of time as immutable, yet we know it to be elastic. It bends and stretches, like Dali's drooping watch-faces and Einstein's speeding trains, as certain moments pass with glacial slowness, while others speed by. We think of time as intangible, yet we know it only through physical objects: swinging pendulums, unwinding cogs, or orbiting celestial bodies. We think of time as infinite, yet physicists have calculated its beginnings, as ancient calendar-makers envisioned its end. For the 40th Annual Village Halloween Parade, we explored the two faces of Time (as described by Mircea Eliade): tempus, the measured linear march from birth to death; and templum, the cyclical affirmation of rhythm, ritual, and rebirth. For our journey through Time, the White Rabbit (of Wonderland renown) is our guide. We meet him en route, pocket-watch at the ready, and very late -- like us, he is rushed along by the passing instants, harried by a flock of flying alarm clocks (time flies, indeed!) and enmeshed in a costumed churning clockwork of gears and timekeepers. This is worldly, historical time: linear, inexorable, mortal. But then something happens. The clock strikes 12. Alarm bells ring, and all motion ceases. Then, a carousel of clock faces blooms out of nothing, forming a circular stage. A flickering light appears and we see a stage of moving shadows, a giant zoetrope on which we meet rabbit again, now liberated from his mechanized regime and playfully leaping over the tortoise in an endless circle game. This is cyclical time, seasonal time, dream time, repeating and reaffirming, deathless and eternal. Meanwhile, outside the carousel, time for the clockwork figures has slowed to a stop-motion tableau. For a moment – which might be an eternity – we enter a time out of time, in which a lifetime might be lived in the interval between two ticks of the clock.