On the Grand Performance
4 May 2011 | Share:
To have seen and heard this city roar and dance and fly last weekend, to have sensed the clap of feet on dirt, pavement, track, to have stared into the fading night sky utterly entranced as a child’s dream became a spinning hallucination 100 feet in the air, is to have been an instrument in a refined and wondrous urban orchestration, a truly grand performance. Perhaps the air was scored first by the bat of Ryan Howard Friday night, bat as baton in front of 45,000 plus, and from then on—but for the porous goaltending across the street—the mere everyday city would cease to matter.
“So often,” I wrote in the Possible City , observing quotidian Philadelphia, “the city seems small when, in fact, it is huge; it seems stifling when it might be freeing; it seems homogenous when it is unendingly pluralistic; it seems fragmented and disconnected when it might be integrated and therefore broadly enticing.”
But on the other hand, “a city that performs…raises the specter of our consciousness.”
Saturday morning, in the wind and the high clouds, the performance started slowly. Hundreds of syncopated brooms emerged as a momentary anti-rain dance against the rubbish storm. The sun emerged and bit by bit the lines began to form: on Broad Street for the Ferris wheel, on Passyunk for the culinary tent, on the track at Franklin Field. The women’s 4X1,500 was about to begin.
So many of us, sensing the delight, took to the magnificent urban stage.
Around 3:30, in front of another 45 grand, Roy Halladay finished a 107-pitch complete game. An eight year old shortstop snagged a line drive at Taney Field, but the 48,000 across the Schuylkill roared (as if in reaction to a line in a speech by Mussolini or Caesar) because Omo Osaghae of Texas Tech finished the 110 meter hurdles in 13.35.
And then in the evanescent light we waited. Flyers fans emerged from the subway to the join the mounting crowd, and eventually some 300,000 eyes rested on the members of La Compagnie Transe Express, who were about to transform steel into a whispering dream, and all the while inside Verizon Hall the Philadelphia Orchestra began to play Stravinsky, a program themed “Greek gods and mythology.” A bell was rung and torches were lit and slowly the steel contraption positioned at Broad and Spruce rose and the magic flower opened. Drummers swirled 40, 60, 80 feet in the air and when they stopped the city froze: a lone, illuminated woman made love with the the flying trapeze.
When the dream night ended, the vacuums came and Broad and Spruce became Broad and Spruce once more. But only until sunrise. Then some 30,000 pairs of feet slapped the pavement, from Central High to the Navy Yard. The fastest performer at this year’s Broad Street Run, which is the largest 10 mile race in the country, belonged to Ketema Nigusse of Ethiopia. He crossed the finish line at 00:46:29, having run at about the same speed as the Broad Street Subway.
PIFA photograph by Christian Carollo
Penn Relays photograph by Washington Post/Getty Images