Parade week august 1 to 7, 2004..

  The Obelisks head for the City

         The “Aunts” from the Saguenay arrived on the 1^st of August, and the plan was to get ready for the Burlington Latino Festival which was scheduled for Saturday, the 7^th .  Fabienne wanted to learn some English, and Hélene, a grade school director, was ready to jump into any new project! Neither of them had any experience with this kind of theatre, but as soon as Sam gave the outline ideas, Hélène was right out on the stage leading the group.  Earlier in the season, we took an idea about puppet structures we had seen in Mexico and blew it up, making obelisks ten to fourteen feet high, mounting heads and hands on them and decorating them all the way around with colorful cloth. The Aunts went straight to work!... great and large ideas were seen on the move, Hunger mountain to Church Street in Burlington..

The challenge was also to see how we would manipulate these large puppets, and how they would respond to the street.  We bought four, four wheeled carts to mount the figures on and we schemed how to use all the new masks, Trotsky, Frida, Diego, the Stalinists, the Devils as well as some great masks we had made that represented The People.

         Nancy Bove, the Burlington Parks and Recreation events coordinator had invited us again and we were thrilled!...Dragon Dance has a long history with parades, from First Night to the historic Dewey Day, Spring pageants,  the Worcester fourth of July, and many more!  … Going to watch a parade can be a wonderful outing, but having the task of preparing an ensemble of oversized figures and getting them to the parade site is quite another story! We groaned about the trip and the expense and Nancy tried to send a bus for us, but the puppets grew so quickly and unexpectedly to such enormous proportions that we could not get them in the bus. We rented a 16 foot truck from Barre and when the morning of the parade arrived we were first in line at eight am, it was raining lightly, Bob Fisher and Jerome and Sophie were at home when we got back with the truck, and the five of us slowly figured out how to put all the pieces in the 16’ by 8’ by 8’ compartment. The puppets were partially assembled. We used sawhorses and packing cases and made different levels and piece-by-piece fitted the entire parade in this mere thousand cubic foot, box on wheels.

           Parking on Church street was arranged, again, thanks to Nancy, and we had a person from her group help us as we unloaded everything and set up a workshop right at the top of Church. Giant hands and four wheeled carts, four foot heads and staplers were flying. It was quite a scene; we met Iraq vets and people from Queretaro and a very friendly and helpful guy from Chile as well as Jose Davila, a UVM engineering professor from Costa Rica. The crowds were forming around our site, from kids to elders all amazed by the magic of the theatre. We were speaking Mexican and French and English. The screw guns whirred and very quickly the assembly was finished.  Then, we stood the puppets up. What a stunning set! Four really grand puppets on wheels, Frida, Diego, Trotsky  and “The People”….some of them close to twenty feet high, very colorful very amazing. Each character was dressed in their conflicts, Frida in bright green, held skeletons in her hands representing her romance with Death. The figure of Diego in blue and black, included all the women of his infidelities and the Trotsky puppet dressed in black and white horizontal bands, was wearing his Stalinist pursuers. The people, four large dark heads mounted on an obelisk decorated in red white and green, colors of the Mexican flag, shared their obelisk with a little red devil. 

             The band Sambatucada! was right in front of us and they struck up their first samba, everyone started to swing, Janice arrived, Fisher was on hand, Nancy leant us a couple of people, the parade was about to start. We had never tried these tall figures on the carts and we had never tried moving them down hill, at this time we were still wondering how we were going to manage the walk! We had one person for each figure and maybe two extras.

         The rain stopped and the Sambatucada! percussionists who had all been playing under an awning the whole time, stepped out and began the march and we watched and heard them descend church street as the sun came out.  We disassembled the puppets and packed their soggy eminences back in the truck!

          We drove back down 89 with our sun-glasses on…!

Back home, we started the wood stove, right away, and laid out all the puppets covering all the floor space upstairs and down and the tables and couches, anywhere the backs could be flat, we pushed out the dents and bruises and we closed all the doors and windows, we wanted them to dry as fast as possible.

   Next day we received a check from Nancy to cover our expenses and a nice note telling us she would let us know if there was going to be a Latino Fest Parade next year and inviting us to be in it.