This year, Macy’s hosts its 91st Thanksgiving Day parade. With all the costumes, singing, dancing, choreography, floating sets and music, a parade represents an oft-overlooked cousin in the performing arts family.
Human beings and parading have a long love affair, from early uses in rites of passage to military victories to funeral processions to the American modern spectaculars like Mardi Gras and, happening this Thursday, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.
In the United States, we parade for holidays, gay pride, soldiers, soldiers who died in combat, giant football competitions like the Rose Bowl, to mark our independence from Britain and to celebrate a newly elected president, mayor or sheriff. If you travel around small-town America, you’ll find as many local festivals as there are small towns and a parade that goes with it. (Chicken Festival, Strawberry Festival, Cow Chip Festival, Festival of Trees, PumpkinFest, GeckoFest … the list goes on.)
Some of the great American parades developed as off-shoots of a bigger parade. For example, take a look at the Mardi Gras Indians. Deprived access to permits because of racism, the New Orleanians of African descent created their own parading organization, ranking structure and processional guidelines. As a show of respect to the native tribes in Louisiana who sheltered enslaved Africans and brought them into their communities, this band of African-Americans in New Orleans named themselves the Mardi Gras Indians.
They formed tribes instead of krewes and relied on the cultural knowledge of West African and Native American beadwork to construct unbelievably intricate beaded “suits” for the parades as well as gathering the requisite brass band and showing off in processional dancing. Though the origins included (often mortal) fighting to settle scores, eventually the sheer magnitude of artistic ability to create the elaborate Mardi Gras Indians suits (called “masking”) gained national attention. One of our favorite New Orleanians in this tradition is Ronald Lewis who curates and directs The House of Dance and Feathers, a Mardi Gras Indian museum in a trailer on the back of his property in the Ninth Ward.
Here, Ronald talks about the time and effort required to make an Indian suit, and you can catch a glimpse of a few Mardi Gras Indian parades in the footage as well:
Though Mardi Gras and the Mardi Gras Indians specialize in the New Orleans-style brass band, most parades follow suit with marching bands. This Thanksgiving, Macy’s parade features 12 marching bands from around the country as well as performances from celebrities (Gwen Stefani opens the parade this year with “White Christmas,” which we find ironic), Broadway stars (like Hamilton’s Leslie Odom, Jr, who performed at The Straz this past summer) and seven dance troupes. The spectacle of Macy’s parade is, of course, the enormous balloons which make this parade so unique.
From a theatrical standpoint, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade represents a mobile multi-faceted show complete with the “wild-card” variable of navigating an enormous helium balloon. This year’s floating Pillsbury Doughboy is large enough to make four million crescent rolls. That’s a lot to handle.
We speak for many Gen X-ers who cherish the 1997 Thanksgiving Day parade in which Barney the Dinosaur was impaled by a Times Square street lamp during surprise wind gusts and died spectacularly on 51st St. Symbolic as it was culturally, Barney’s death would probably make a great documentary featuring interviews with the unfortunate souls tasked with handling the careening character. Quelle horreur!
Parades, especially for joyful holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, capture the youthful insouciance of performing arts: it’s fun for fun’s sake. We can laugh, clap, ooh and ahh, be entertained and fawn over favorite characters and performers for no other reason than to enjoy the moment.
Delight for delight’s sake.
We can be grateful for that.
This year’s parade starts at 9 a.m. EST, broadcast live on NBC. Keep your eyes peeled for performances from casts of four Broadway blockbusters, Dear Evan Hansen, Anastasia, SpongeBob SquarePants and Once on This Island. Florida’s own Flo Rida (get it?) stars on the Krazy Glue float, “Fun House.”