Ladder-Day Saint
On the morning of August 7, 1974, the French high-wire artist Philippe Petit performed one of the great stunts in this city’s history, crossing back and forth on a steel cable strung between the World Trade Center’s North and South Towers, some 1,312 feet above street level. “On one side, the mass of a mountain,” Petit wrote in To Reach the Clouds, his 2002 account of the day. “On the other, the universe of the clouds, so full of unknown that it seems empty to us.”
Those words rang through the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine’s darkened interior earlier this month, at a performance consecrating the fiftieth anniversary of Petit’s dalliance with the void. “I approach the edge,” Petit’s recorded voice said over the speakers, and at that moment he approached the edge of a landing that had been erected twenty feet above the nave floor. “I step over the beam,” he said, pretending to step over the South Tower’s parapet wall. Then the part we had all been waiting for: “I place my left foot on the steel rope.” The Man on Wire was on wire again. Several people in my section snuck photos, even though we had been warned earlier that the light from a phone could cause him to fall.
Towering!!, written and directed by Petit in collaboration with his partner Judith Friedlaender, told the story of the World Trade Center walk through nineteen vignettes. In one, dancers from Ballet Tech did their best impressions of the old master’s moves. In another, two actors playing cops did a slapstick reenactment of the arrest that ended the original effort, handcuffing Petit for the dubious crime of “making beauty.”
It would have been impossible for the night’s autotribute to match the original “coup,” as Petit calls it, in terms of cunning, risk, or grandiosity, but it did add one element that was sorely missing from the original walk: the recording artist Sting. Sting, who is known for his own spiritual-athletic accomplishments in the field of tantric sex, sang his songs “Fragile” and “Fields of Gold,” the latter of which envisions a young couple making love in the barley grass outside the singer’s sixteenth-century English manor. Petit, now in gold-sequined overshirt, lay down on the wire as if in contemplation of this image. Then Sting brought the show to a climax with the world premiere of “Let the Great World Spin,” a newly written ode to Philippe.
Indeed, Sting’s affected holiness—endemic among British pop singers of the Live Aid generation—was a natural fit for Towering!!, which repeatedly insisted on the holiness of Petit himself. The titular lyric of “Let the Great World Spin” was squeezed into a couplet with the phrase “absolve me of my sins,” and the Very Reverend Patrick Molloy, in his program notes, asked us to imagine the performance as “a ladder stretching to heaven.” Meanwhile, for much of the show, only Petit and the cross above the altar were illuminated. Balancier in hand, he not so subtly doubled its sacred shape.
Thus Petit walked another sort of tightrope: On one side, the lighthearted kitsch of a circus trick or greasy pole competition. On the other, the kind of frocked seriousness that gets you a residency at the largest non-Catholic cathedral in the world. “This is not a daredevil act,” he said before a 1997 show at Saint John the Divine. “It is an act of poetry and art.” Petit’s funambulism was flawless, graceful. But as a semisecular saint for post-9/11 New York, he didn’t quite convince. The ladder to heaven was missing a few rungs.