Laurie Anderson and (in memory) Lou Reed will be the grand marshals of this year’s 50th annual Village Halloween Parade.
Avante-garde performance artist Anderson (“O Superman”) and rock-’n’-roll icon Reed (“Sweet Jane,” “Walk on the Wild Side”) were married from 2008 until his death in 2013.
The ghoulish procession will kick off on Tues., Oct. 31, at 7 p.m. at Canal Street and Sixth Avenue and head up to W. 16th Street.
The parade theme for 2023 will be “Upside/Down: Inside/Out!”
Jeanne Fleming, the parade’s artistic and producing director, explains, “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 it 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!”
The parade theme will also be conveyed by the use of mirrors, its Web site says, to “acknowledge 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.
“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.”
Fifty human-sized shards (one for each year of the parade), each animated by a figure wearing a Cubist mask, will “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. … 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.”
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