Philippe Petit still has his head 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.
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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.
Courtesy photo
Philippe Petit, above nothing, between the towers of the World Trade Center.
“Sometimes I stop and say, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to put a cable in there,'” he says, holding her at arm’s length and looking up. “This little rope helps me to dream of crossroads.” Always in the void, without safety.
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.
Photo Brendan Smialowski / AFP
The setting: the magnificent National Building Museum and its huge hall – 96 meters long, 48 meters high – with gilded columns.
Photo Brendan Smialowski / AFP
Long before that, he polishes his installation and adjusts his pendulum.
Photo Brendan Smialowski / AFP
One step away from anchoring the heavy cable, a thick notebook: hundreds of detailed instructions and sketches, years of work to make this installation possible – and it won’t be the last.
Photo Richard PIERRIN / AFP
“Passionate Life”
“I’ll 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 to disobey the movement of authority.” He climbs everywhere, on chairs in the kitchen, in trees, tames the 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 existence, he always projects himself somewhere else, into his “life of passion”. “No two shows are ever the same (…), each time it’s an adventure where I learn where I discover,” he says in front of the wooden beams, pulleys 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 string.”