AFP, published Thursday, March 23, 2023 at 7:20 p.m
At 73, Philippe Petit is still in the stars. Orange shirt and red suspenders, there the French tightrope walker squats on the balcony of a huge building in Washington, he looks at his cable and thinks about the consequences when he gets to the other side.
Nearly 50 years after the feat that made him famous – walking a taut wire between New York’s 1,300-foot twin towers – the energetic man still carries a short red cord in his pocket.
“Sometimes I stop and say, +It would be nice to run a cable there,+” he says, holding it at arm’s length and looking up. “This little rope helps me dream of crossroads”. Always in the void, without security.
On Thursday night he will move 15 meters above the ground on a cable for an appearance before a gala floor in the capital of the United States, a country where he has lived for decades. The setting: the magnificent National Building Museum and its huge hall – 96 meters long, 48 meters high – with gilded columns.
Long before that, he polishes his installation and adjusts his pendulum. One step away from the heavy cable anchor, a thick notebook: its hundreds of detailed instructions and sketches, years of work to make this installation possible – and it won’t be the last.
– “Life with passion” –
“I will never retire,” says the tightrope walker with the strawberry blonde hair. “I have a lot of projects up my sleeve,” which are kept in a box under his bed at his home in upstate New York. “There are extraordinary places, natural places, chasms, canyons, icebergs, and there are also incredible +buildings+.”
From childhood “I began not to follow the movement of authority”. He climbs everywhere, on kitchen chairs, in trees, tames verticality, “and then one fine day I naturally stretch a rope between two trees”.
A film “The Walk” starring actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt and a documentary (“Le Funambule”, “Man on Wire”) narrate his illegal epic in the 1974 New York sky under the wide eyes of the crowd and the police.
Tired of being reduced to these few minutes of his existence, he always projects himself elsewhere, into his “life of passion”. “No show is like the other (…), each time it’s an adventure in which I learn, in which I discover,” he says in front of the wooden beams, rollers and dynamometer that will support his aerial hike on Thursday evening.
And then, he says like a wise old man, “with my 50-55 years of experience I have more control”.
One thing that may annoy him is the slackline, a recent mountain practice that replaces the metal cable with a flat webbing a few inches wide stretched in a garden or between two mountains.
“It’s a Sunday pastime, it’s great,” he says acidly. “It has no elegance, no art, no thought, no poetry, no humanity.” “It’s a great sport,” he continues, “a different world from the majesty and beauty of putting your life on a tightrope.”