The spirit of New York City comes out each Halloween for the Village Halloween Parade. It’s New York City’s Mardi Gras, giving vent to an explosion of creativity, expressing this year’s theme, “Body & Soul.”
What has become “the nation’s most wildly creative public participatory event in the greatest city in the world!” the 53rd Village Halloween Parade with 50,000 costumed participants, towering puppets, electrifying performers, and 50 bands kicked off from Canal Street, winding its way uptown on Sixth Avenue to 15th Street.
Joey Arias, performance artist, cabaret singer, drag artist, author, comedian, stage persona and film actor was the Grand Marshal.
The parade is free for all to view or join in costume and hundreds of thousands of people line the parade route, in addition to the thousands marching.
For over 50 years, the Village Halloween Parade has transformed the streets of New York City into a spellbinding spectacle of creativity, self-expression, and community spirit. Each year, a unique theme shapes the identity of the parade and reflects the cultural moment in time.
“The skeletons that lead the Halloween Parade each year walk the razor’s edge between the physical world and the spirit realm,” said the Village Halloween Parade’s long-time Artistic and Producing Director Jeanne Fleming. “We are all wandering souls. And in order to truly embrace and live within our spirit, we must feel it in our bones, and so need an earthly body.
“But we live in an increasingly disembodied world. These days, we communicate through screens, create virtual selves and experience so much of life through a device. But where is the body in all this? And where does the spirit live? We need to get back into our bodies to express our souls! So this year, we celebrate the timeless connection between body and soul. Let’s embrace what it is most essential to us as humans – our body (the skeleton!), our imagination (the soul!), and DANCE (body and soul together!)”
She added, “The separation of matter and spirit, of life and death, becomes less clear on Hallow’s Eve, when the Skeletons – the OG ‘All Souls’ – reunite with their bodies to dance one more time. How easily we forget that this deep entanglement of body and soul, so palpable on Halloween Night, is really true all the time. Even as the skeletons journey inward to their bodies, we journey outward every night, sleepwalking into the netherworld – where dreams await.”
“We dream in our bodies (often of our bodies), even as our souls traverse terrains of memory and imagination. When we fly in our dreams, we can feel our buoyancy with arms outstretched,” Fleming wrote.
“When we walk through imagined landscapes, our feet feel the ground shift beneath us. We feel the passage of minutes or hours, even as no time elapses. Sleep endows us with the power to experience – again and again – a momentary uplift from our physical constraints, to remake the world on our own terms. Like the classic depiction of the Soul hovering over the Death-bed, we are out of body, yet fully embodied – a liminal space between life and death, where we remember, fleetingly, that anything is possible.”
Alex Kahn and Sophia Michahelles of Processional Arts Workshop, the Official Puppeteers of NY’s Village Halloween Parade, said, “So this year, we invite the Parade to walk with us through a waking dream. A dozen luminous sleeping figures, clad in their pajamas and nightgowns, discover a domestic space intimately familiar yet unsettlingly strange.”
