Reverie
43nd ANNUAL NY VILLAGE HALLOWEEN PARADE. OCTOBER 31, 2016

DESIGN, CONCEPT, and DIRECTION: Alex Kahn, Sophia Michahelles
ARTISTIC and TECHNICAL SUPPORT: Kate Whitehead
VILLAGE HALLOWEEN PARADE PRODUCER: Jeanne Fleming


"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.