Puppet Design to Illustrate the Theme: Mirror Mirror
Read down to explore! See Images at the bottom!
The 2023 Theme is: Upside/Down : Inside/OUT!
In the last few year’s we have seen our world turn UPSIDE/DOWN and we all went INSIDE–not just inside to our apartments and houses, but inside ourselves.
For a while it felt like we were living between two worlds! Now is is time to come OUT into that new world –but, now that we have had time to reflect on it–what do we want to come out AS?
Are we the same or have we changed? And, then take that to your costume self!!!!
WHO or WHAT do we most NEED and WANT to be on Halloween 2023! How do we return to innocence after experience? Do we? Can we? Should we?
The Halloween Parade has always been a night of transformation, but this topsy turvy year feels even more-so in terms of realizing a dream, being who you are most authentically in your imagination.
Come on OUT on Halloween and show us your dreamiest self!
Remember: You have to sleep in order to wake up!
Hallelujah Halloween!
Jeanne Fleming
Artistic and Producing Director
Puppet Performance Design 2023 – Mirror Mirror
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.
Perhaps the familiar yet strange mirrorworld we’ve all pieced together holds possibilities we never imagined.
—Alex Kahn and Sophia Michahelles of Processional Arts Workshop
