Meet the Masters of Puppets: How We Helped Create the Historic 50th Annual Village Halloween Parade

This year it was truly a unique honor and pleasure to take part in the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade’s 50th Anniversary Celebration on Tuesday, October 31, not only as one of the 26 “Snake Puppet” holders who rambled and slithered up Ave. of the Americas, but also as one of the volunteer artisans and assemblers of the seven Illuminated Headed 14-foot tall Mechanical “Sweepers” that were the hit of the Parade this year. Working off of a tip, in late October we traveled up to a secluded barn the size of an aircraft hangar near Rhinecliff, NY where the Halloween Parade giant puppets have been crafted and assembled for over 25 years. As we exited our Uber on that Sunday morning, we were curiously greeted by 14 chickens and two dogs roaming about the farm. For 50 years running, the Village Halloween Parade grassroots event has become a night of Transformation, a perennial local favorite, and NYC’s “Carnivale.” Every year, the “Masters of Puppets,” the incredible Puppet master team of Alex Kahn and Sophia Michahelles, who are the creative geniuses and organizers behind the annual Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, aim to create different themes that elevate people out of the typical Walmart-type clichés of Axe Murderers and Zombies. The broad theme for this year’s 50th Anniversary extravaganza (the first started with merely 300 or so Greenwich Villagers in 1974) would be called “Inside Out, Upside Down.” According to Alex, the brainchild behind this year’s 50th Anniversary concept is that we are “…sort of acknowledging this mounting sense of disorientation that people have, like it’s after Covid, we’re back to normal but it doesn’t seem ‘normal.’ We’ve come back to something but it’s now uncannily unrecognizable. Through our personal lives, climate change, Covid after effects and global politics things are getting stranger and stranger, even though we are being told we are in some sense ‘normal.’ ” Alex further explained, “So we have this moment of reckoning with the 50th anniversary, at odds with this ‘upside down, inside out’ concept. Since mirrors turn things inside out and upside down, this would be a great opportunity to reflect on 50 years of the Halloween parade.” Hoilla! This year’s Halloween parade’s brilliant central idea of using Shattered Mirrors was born, having been inspired by artists such as Jean Cocteau, Hans Christian Andersen, the Infinity Rooms by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, and Dutch artist M.C. Escher.

Deconstructing the 
Artistic Concept

Through costume design, we can now deconstruct Alex’s artistic concept and relate these fresh visuals to our emotional context of the present. Imagine the Mirror has just shattered in a slow motion explosion. The shards of the mirror are flipping and tumbling high through the air, creating spontaneous kaleidoscopic Infinity Rooms and Funhouse mirrors as they go, reflecting upon the crowd. The Shard “Carriers” walking beneath are covered in micro-shards (affectionately termed “Shard-Dinos and “Shard-Donnes!”) are wearing Cubist masks — try to picture images of blank faces betraying their own visage deeming themselves unrecognizable — shattered people each clinging to one tiny “shard of reality.” Their own sense of reality is that the world is crazy, but at least “…I can still walk my dog every morning at 7:30 am!” Ultimately, what the Shard Carriers are trying to do is bring this Shattered Mirror back together once again — a thankless and hopeless task! However, despite this apparent exercise in futility, the Shard Carriers do have help.

Here Come the “Sweepers”!

The “Sweepers” were created by Ralph Lee, who started the Village Halloween parade in 1974. Lee viewed it as a pageant puppetry theatrical event more so than the spectacle we view the Parade as today. The original “Sweepers” were these crones with lovely masks on short stilts. But since the parade has grown so much bigger, this year there were seven new “Sweepers” that were constructed and scaled to be 14-foot tall all-illuminated figures (even the “brooms” light up!) with big puppet hands doing this broad sweeping motion. In homage to Lee (who recently died in May) and his contributions to this event, Alex and Sophia decided to bring back these classic “Sweepers” for this parade’s 50th Anniversary! The “Sweepers” haven’t been in the Parade for many years. But what better time to bring them back and morph them into “giant people with brooms” when you have shards everywhere!

A Truly Amazing Spectacle of Teamwork

This year’s 50th Parade Grand Marshall was experimental musical artist Laurie Anderson, so at some point during the procession when the theme music shifts, Alex has decided to adapt a Laurie Anderson piece when the shards all “come together.” One by one, a “jigsaw puzzle of shards” all come together like a miraculous grand symphony thanks to the incredible teamwork of these 40 volunteer Shard Carriers. Magically the full Mirror takes shape and our reality is whole again! Truly a sight to behold! However, there’s coda; a moment near the end of where there is a crashing of glass, where the shards all fly out in this wonderful moment of spinning chaos, at an end point where the Processional music wells, only for the entire audio visual performance spectacle to loop once again into the next iteration.

Rewinding Back: Assembling the Sweepers in Alex’s Workshop

Back in late October, Felicia and I donated our time and efforts into helping create two of the seven illuminated four-foot tall heads of the Sweepers. These wire-framed heads were created out of Papier-mâché, and our job was to completely glue several layers of sheer tissue paper over the cheesecloth fabric to make the heads complete. Refining these illuminated heads definitely was a messy job, but we were both determined and proud to have been invited by Alex and Sophia to travel from NYC and take part in a creative eight hour work day. We were happy to volunteer and “lend a hand” in the creation of these awesome giant puppets and this historical project.

Halloween Night: 
Slithering the Massive Snake 
Puppet Up Sixth Avenue

Felicia and I literally could write a complete story about being one of the carriers on the 26-member Snake Puppet team on Halloween night. So we will. Stay tuned for a future article.

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Link to the Village View article:

https://villageview.nyc/2023/12/06/meet-the-masters-of-puppets/

Kaju Roberto is an accomplished musician, singer/ songwriter, journalist, and an award-winning producer. He is the artist Rad Jet on Spotify. https://open.spotify.com/artist/32si7c4nk210HPuqbXvhJg