Handmade Parade is a biannual, community-created tradition and a grassroots, Mardi Gras-style walking parade with music, costumes, painted faces, puppets, stilt walkers, dancers, and so much more!
This legendary spectacle of imagination is an opportunity to dance together in the streets of Hillsborough, NC, celebrating community, creativity, and fun!
Drone footage courtesy of Durham_Cool.
Art as an embodiment might be a key facet of the entire parade: what started as an organized event became a march down Churton Street, culminating in a celebration at River Park, various puppets and their puppeteers dancing through the grass, other puppets strewn across the grass for people to interact with.
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The line between art and artist, between performer and audience, had been crossed.
But this line is not the only line [Donovan] Zimmerman said he tries to cross with Paperhand.
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“That's always the underscore seen, for me, is helping us all remember our connection with the natural world, and that there's a way that we can lean into that and hopefully shift the paradigm a little bit more towards a reverential and celebratory and connected place,” he said.
Morgan Brenner
The Daily Tarheel, 2024
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Picture giant handmade puppets, rollicking ragtime bands, performers on stilts, dancing troupes, and hundreds of children and adults marching through the streets of a small North Carolina town celebrating the diversity of their community...
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The Hillsborough Handmade Parade was conceived in 2007 as an annual community participation celebration by Mark Donley and Tinka Jordy. In the spring of 2008, a series of workshops both public and private were initiated that led to the First Handmade Parade in October 2008.
2024 PHOTOGRAPHY
See photos from Handmade Market here, and learn more about the artists, food, entertainment, and more featured in the 2024 market!
Photos courtesy of Hillsborough Photography.
Photos courtesy of Durham_Cool.
A Word from HAC Programs & Marketing Director:
It wasn’t that long ago I spent my days in a corporate cubicle, journaling about how badly I wanted to work for a small nonprofit. Somewhere my efforts could positively impact the world around me.
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I’d never asked community members to dress up as a bluebird or a dog and walk through town with our former mayor for a promotional video.
Hillsborough's 2022 Found Object Handmade Parade with Bird, Dog, and former Mayor Tom Stevens. Videography courtesy of Hillsborough Photography.
I’d certainly never assembled a giant puppet or coordinated this many strangers to dance or march down a main street.
While inventorying puppets and materials for workshops, Mollie Thomas, HAC's former Executive Director, and I found a box of old shoes and belts in HAC storage and joked about how ridiculous that was. Why would HAC need a random box of old thrift rack shoes and belts? It wasn’t until we were on the lawn at parade staging that a veteran volunteer arrived and asked, "Where are the pole-holding shoe belts?"
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That first year, I couldn’t stop welling up from the absurdity and asking how on earth I found myself here, and at the same time - Of course I did. This is exactly the kind of work I've wanted to do.
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How to stage participants (who may or may not show up to the Burwell School) popped into my head one day, and I captured it in a sketchbook. The uncertainty was humbling and liberating.
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With a clipboard in hand, my face painted, a walky-talky on my hip, flower crown on my head, and giant animals in every color of the rainbow - a horizon behind me - we rounded a corner and I locked eyes with Mollie. I saw her witnessing the same thing I was. It happened, we did it, and our entire community did it with us! Tears burst from both of our faces.
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Thousands of people came together to revel in the gregarious, satirical, their talents, to play together in a time where isolation had been at a lifetime high. It was overwhelmingly cool and rare and interesting. That day is imprinted on my heart and can still bring tears to my eyes.
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This event is an invitation to put down our fear and self-consciousness, the stories we tell ourselves, our self-limiting beliefs, for a few precious hours. It's an invitation to be open, there, and a part of something.
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The Handmade Parade has a long history of being themed to honor the Eno River and up-cycling, breathing new life into our world with imagination, ingenuity, and what we already have. These concepts were intentionally woven into the identity of this parade by its originators and champions, including former HAC Board Member, Tinka Jordy, who is also to thank for the Solstice Lantern Walk. They will continue to be this parade's forever theme. We invite you to find inspiration in them year after year.
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This year, we introduce another Parade Inspiration as well, and it feels only appropriate for a town well-known for its writers and poets. In a word...
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**Sonder:**
*n. the sudden realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own - with their own ambitions, routines, loves, worries, and pain - an epic story that continues invisibly around you, in which you might appear once, in the background of a coffee shop, in a car passing on the highway, or, in moments like this - dancing in the streets of Hillsborough, NC, in the Handmade Parade.*
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On June 1, 2024, we let the mundane and banal, the monotonous and humdrum, rest. We come together as our most imaginative selves, in support of one another, to celebrate fun and what becomes possible when we come together.
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It is an honor to serve this place and our community. Thank you for allowing me to learn from and with you. I can’t wait to do it again!
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Ivana (Iva) Beveridge
Hillsborough Arts Council
Programs & Marketing Director
2024
