69th Street Transfer Bridge, Manhattan

The bike path on the westside of Manhattan allows little known landscapes of the city to loom into view.  These aspects of the city startle, seduce and calm you.  A spectacular section of the bikeway along Manhattan's westside going uptown is the 69th Street Bridge.  Visually dramatic, bulky and charismatic, this bridge and its neigboring metallic structures sunken in the Hudson River, draw a scenario fitting an operatic staging.  It could be Faust's abode, or the grand temple of forgotten Native American spirits.  Harmattan Theater Company wrote to the Riverside Park South Trust for permission to perform in front of this extraordinary outdoor landscape.  The park's people were very uncomfortable about giving us permission to perform against the fantastical backdrop of the 69th Street Transfer Bridge.  But- the setting deserves a spectacular theatrical event that has the spiritual breadth of Christo's Gates, while also transforming the surreal landscape into a dream scape of a defunct industrial past, whose logics still haunt our understanding of modernity and its progressions.  Harmattan Theater company continues to dream a theatrical event that would put performers on the rusting, dilapitated bridge, with projected voices and buskins used in the Greek theater to raise the heights of actors standing on the buckled up railway lines.