Parade Director
Fleming took responsibility for continuing the Village Halloween Parade in 1985 after its founding artistic director, Ralph Lee, decided to no longer run the event, which he felt had lost its original intimacy and neighborhood flavor. Fleming had been working for Lee as a fundraiser since 1983 and had been a participant in the parade for several years prior to that. By this time the parade had already relocated to its current Sixth Avenue route, at the request of the NYPD. In addition to producing new puppets and processional elements, Fleming planned for its future growth by working with five Manhattan neighborhood's community board, local police, residents, sponsors, schools, and community organizations. She is credited for building the parade to its present state; it draws two million spectators and fifty thousand participants.
For the Halloween Parade, Fleming commissions puppet artists to develop and depict annual themes that explore the holiday's historic origins, and its psychic, spiritual, and mythical meanings, focusing on selected aspects from year to year. Since 1998, the Halloween Parade has been led by official puppeteers Superior Concept Monsters, whose chief artists, Alex Kahn and Sophia Michahelles, conceive the theme for each year and create large-scale performance works to embody it, involving hundreds of volunteers in the process. The notion of Halloween as a night of transformation is often reflected in the themes, as well as ideas of self-expression and community.
In 2001, New York City government and police allowed Fleming to produce the second large-scale event in NYC to take place after the tragic events of 9/11 (the first was the Columbus Day Parade on October 8). Parade puppet designer Sophia Michahelles developed the theme of "Phoenix Rising,” (a reference to the mythical bird that rises up out of its own ashes). For the event, Michahelles created a giant illuminated Phoenix surrounded by lanterns reminiscent of the towers. The 2001 Parade drew fewer spectators than a typical year, but was hailed worldwide as a healing event for the entire City, showing that life would go on and the City was safe for tourists and its own citizens.
Read more about this topic: Jeanne Fleming
Famous quotes containing the words parade and/or director:
“The parade was here, but it disappeared around a corner.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“He wrote me sad Mother’s Day stories. He’d always kill me in the stories and tell me how bad he felt about it. It was enough to bring a tear to a mother’s eye.”
—Connie Zastoupil, U.S. mother of Quentin Tarantino, director of film Pulp Fiction. Rolling Stone, p. 76 (December 29, 1994)