This is an event that evokes the muses...

By NYU Professor Greg Steinbrenner

On some days in the City it is easy to imagine that the world, or rather this world, or rather this culture is in decline. There are holes in the street, there are holes in the fabric of society through which more and more people slip into the desolate world of margin and hunger. There are gaping holes in the moral fabric of those who are not marginalized in the material sense; they suffer instead a metaphysical desolation of moral ambiguity. On some days, sadly few, (and for that all the more precious) the City pauses in its rampage, and the people breathe and they grow and they rediscover dreams long stifled. Hope is not dead, nor are dreams and fantasies, that on most days in most people lie dormant. On Halloween the spirits walk and the human spirit talks loudly and clearly, and it all happens at around seven o'clock on 6th Avenue in Greenwich Village.

Crowds. Thrilling and frightening, they appear spontaneously when the subway is late; they appear when the hustlers play the three-card con game; they appear when someone gets arrested; and when Paul Simon plays free in the Park. Crowds appear when the Halloween Parade is about to start. Pools and eddies and swirls of people lining 6th Avenue, standing, shifting, rubbing against the blue police barricades. They appear from out of the depths of the possum-like City, playing dead through the early fall. They come to see the pageant, the spirit of spirit, the crazy line of living expression that gathers a few hours earlier at Spring Street.

The first event is a magnificent living tableau of the spirit of chaos arising organically from the hundreds of marchers. So convincing as chaos is the tableau that one only recognizes that it is only a guise when it sheds its mantle to reveal a parade.

The chaos begins to sound like an orchestra pit with kazoos and steel drums and bongos and tambourines and megaphones and voices uplifted to express great joy. Great joy in expression. What is going on here? This is what I see:

On this night on this street the rules of everyday are set aside. Rules about fitting in, about acting like everyone else to avoid sticking out, rules about assimilation. The margins and center are somehow connected. I see people giving expression to the creative life-affirming parts of their soul. The old women in the Kazoo Band are standing in front of a group of men in G-strings with web headdresses. They will both march up 6th Avenue. What a glorious sight, if only for a moment to share in the rushing splendor of self exhibition! In the pulsating confusion, I am caught up in the spirit of human possibility. Walls are down tonight for the marchers, revealing an indescribably beautiful, powerful, scary realm of diversity. Marchers come in groups--cultural revelers-- the group of giddy yuppies dressed as the hundred and one dalmations join forces with 101 other dalmations fleeing a Cruella DeVille of questionable gender.

This pageant evokes the muses. It explodes in a forest of colors and a sea of smiles onto blocks of dazzled onlookers. The New Yorkers lining the streets are doused in a living waterfall of freedom. The pageant is liberation for lifestyles, cultures, and individuals who are given the chance for one night to show themselves as they wish to be seen.

As a cultural anthropologist, my eyes are trained to observe and comment accurately on everything I see, to theorize about anthropological motivations and interpretations of the pageant. Tonight instead I am left with a mood, a feeling, an amazing possibility. In this dark city, in these wearying times, we are still capable of moments of "ecstatic freedom." And it was not happening on television or on a movie screen, or in my apocalyptic imagination--it was happening in 6th Avenue, right under my nose, in my ears, and in front of my very eyes. Yes, for a moment, I believed that the people around me were really alive.

This piece appeared in the NYU Performance Studies Journal and was written by NYU Professor Greg Steinbrenner. Reprinted by permission of the author.