Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A high wire walker best known for walking between the World Trade Center towers in New York.
On the island
Eight records
For me, this music is a single line. I see it as a rope, a musical rope, pulling me and guarding me.
Sonatina in G major, Op. 100Favourite
This beautiful piece, this Vorjak sonatin, is actually something that I feel very close to, not only because I heard it as a child in my family... but also because I know how it was composed in 1893 by Vorjak.
I use this music in my longest and most complex walk, which was an inclined wire that Chirac asked me to do for the bicentennial in 1989... this music for me is mid-air.
Duke Ellington & Billy Strayhorn
Duke Ellington, Sunset and the Mockingbird has a little history because he was in Tampa, Florida, driving between gigs and the sun was almost coming out of the night and he didn't see, but he heard. He heard a bird.
Jacques Breil, of course, I mean I'm French and I love him. Ne me quit pas, to me it starts as a love anthem.
I was asked to tell the history of the city of Frankfort in one wire walk... and I choose this beautiful calling to the synagogue and this counter, Nachama, with almost no music, is actually climbing to the sky with his voice.
Paco Ibáñez & François Rabbath
Paco Ybanez sings in Spanish a beautiful poem from José Agustín Goiti Solo, who is writing a letter to his young daughter... And remember all your life what I wrote thinking about you. And it brings tears to me because I think of my young daughter called Gypsy, who is no longer alive.
François Rabbath, Michel Delaporte & Georges Arvanitas
To me, this tune has the entire universe in it.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:37Do you feel no fear when you're up there [on the high wire]?
They are not dangerous to me because I prepare them. I want to get to be very old and I don't take any risk... Well, I am mad into protecting my life, that of the buildings that I attach my wire to and that of the people around me, underneath me. So no, there is no fear because there is no reason to be fearful for me.
Presenter asks
4:56When did the idea [to walk between the World Trade Center towers] first come to you?
The dream started before the object of the dream existed. I was actually in a dentist's waiting room as an eighteen years old kid in Paris... and I really opened it at a place where a picture of an architectural model announced that one day those two towers will be built... And then I decided to sneeze very loudly and to tear the page, and I put it in my shirt... I acquired a dream. And that's how it started six and a half years before my work.
Presenter asks
9:13What about your friends at school? Were they fascinated by you?
I had almost no friends. I remember my childhood as being very solitary because I had something to do, and that's probably why I was expelled of five different schools. I was not listening or interested in the least of what's happening on the tableau. I was actually practicing my sleight of hands underneath the desk... I played by myself, and I built my own world, and that has not ceased.
The keepsakes
Presenter asks
9:53What was wrong with your relationship [with your father]?
My parents, as I developed this taste for being a traveling troubadour as a street juggler and later on a wire walker, my parents did not directly support me. So actually I didn't talk really to my parents my entire life until the end of my father's life at eighty years old. We discovered each other and we became friends for a couple of years
Presenter asks
21:05I wonder how you felt on September the eleventh [when the Twin Towers fell].
Something very alive was pulled out of me and I felt crushed. But how can I speak like that when actually the towers in their fall took with them thousands of humane life? I could have been one of them... And yet, how can I talk about it in this apparently selfish way of my towers? And yes, I felt very bad.
“When I am there I become probably half man, half bird, and it's another world.”
“I have been arrested more than four hundred times, mostly for street juggling, sometimes twice a day or twice a night.”
“I don't hope. I know.”
“If you close yourself, if you lock yourself in your own world and offer that role on stage, whatever your stage is, then the people, your audience, will be amazed.”