Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
The venerable Veiled Prophet Parade (vpparade.org) is 137 years old, but it feels brand-new this year—for the first time, it’ll be in Forest Park, at 10 a.m. on July 4. Bill Griffin has rolled with the changes for 36 years, first as an artist and currently as artistic director. To celebrate the city’s 250th anniversary, he’s pulling out all the stops.
• The Veiled Prophet Parade has been in existence for 137 years, but this year is the 132nd parade. There were a few years they didn’t do it during the World Wars.
• This year’s theme is Made in St. Louis, because this is St. Louis’ 250th birthday. You’re going to see 17 floats. We have about 250 performers, too, including bands on floats and on the street. We’re also doing an opening ceremony. There are 90 performers involved in that: singers, dancers, acrobats, baton twirlers, and a color guard. We have probably six or seven choreographers.
• Performers are doing cartwheels and backflips on an object that’s starting, stopping, bouncing, and moving. I’ve heard that on a cruise ship, when people jump, they land about two inches from where they started. On a float, it’s much worse than that. I’ve seen the bravest kids do acrobatic dance routines while in motion. That’s impressive.
• We used to have a float with a trampoline, and we had people doing double flips on a trampoline on a moving float.
• Forest Park is an interesting challenge. I think the parade’s going to look good in the park. Everything has to work, because there’s not a side street you can escape on!
• When I first came here, the floats were all covered in plastic floral sheeting with a palette of about a dozen colors. Now the color palette is infinite, because they’re painted. They used to be boxier. Now they’re more 3-D and sculpted. What we had was good in the ’70s, but now we’ve evolved. Each float is a sculpture with a concept, and we use many mediums to express the concept: visual things and music and costumes and live performance.
• A lot of what we do here was picked up from the Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans. Those krewes called their float storage and building facilities a “den,” and we do, too. Our den is very close to the Saint Louis University campus. We have three buildings. From the outside, you’d never know what goes on inside. The whole place looks very colorful, and most people feel like little kids when they come in here.
• There are eight of us who work year-round, full time: a sculptor, a painter, a fabricator, mechanics, a costume department. It varies. We also have a great deal of volunteers.
• The biggest challenge of the parade is coordinating all the efforts. One guy builds a steel frame, before the next guy covers it in wood, before the next guy applies the Styrofoam, before a sculptor does his work, before a painter…
• We have a riverboat that’s about 50 feet long and 20 feet wide. It’s so St. Louis that we want to use it every year. We have a pirate ship. Pirates never go out of style. There are four confetti cannons on that ship, and the kids love to have you shoot confetti over their heads.
• I like to take the concept of the float all the way to the curb and the spectators. One way is with walkers, like walking pirates. They give out candy or beads. We have walking puppeteers that engage individual children. For several years, we gave out flowers. This year, we have a social-media thing where we’re taking selfies with the crowd and posting them on Twitter and Instagram, then inviting people to do the same, to make it more interactive.
• One year, we had an outstanding float that was a 50-foot pink Cadillac with a 30-foot hound dog on top of it, and a bunch of Elvis look-alike performers. The next year, we built a carwash over that float… The next year, it became a time machine with rocket engines.
• We had one with carhops, and the drive unit was fashioned to look like an Indian motorcycle. When the performer turned the handlebars, he turned the whole float. The next year the Indian motorcycle became a personal rocket ship.
• There’s a lot of creative freedom here. The parade is way different from the way it was 10 years ago and way, way different from 20 years ago, and even more different from 30 years ago. You have to keep reinventing it and making it different and fresh.
• When the parade is done, it’s like you fell off a cliff, and you’re not grounded anymore, and you’re flailing around. Then you come back to the den and destroy everything you made all year long, and make it differently.
• I already have next year’s theme in mind.
• One defining experience for me was last year, when Lisa Melandri, the director of Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, asked me to do a talk on “Parade Culture” during the Jeremy Deller exhibit. During the process of preparing that talk, I realized the close relationship between what we are doing with the parade and what contemporary art is today.
• On the day of the parade, I like to see it while skating on Rollerblades. I can see the whole parade two or three times. To me, it’s the best day of the year.
