Nevada’s Burning Man Festival, Celebrating Self and Community

By Linda Orlando

The Black Rock desert is pretty much empty—no trees, no grass, no hills, no water—but it can be awe-inspiring purely because of the flatness and emptiness of the landscape. A wide open flat plateau of emptiness surrounded by mountains. And this desert void is perhaps the most appropriate place on the planet to hold the annual Burning Man Festival, an experiment in the creation of a temporary community that has been taking place for almost 20 years.

The first burning man came about when Larry Harvey and Jerry James were bumming around a California beach looking for something new to do, and one of them suggested, "Let’s burn a man." The first Burning Man was a wooden Wicca figure only about 8 feet tall, and there were only 20 attendees at the unpublicized event, which at that time had no official name. For the next four years, the annual party celebrating the Burning Man was held at Baker Beach in San Francisco. But in 1990, the Park police decreed that the event couldn’t take place because of the high incidence of wildfires that year, so the party was moved to a new location in the desert, which has since become the Burning Man’s permanent home. Around the same time the fire party was moved, the event started to evolve into a different kind of celebration, one where a temporary community is born each year to generate a small society of people who participate in an event together while still connecting with their own creative powers and the greater world of nature outside of the boundaries of society. By 1999, the man was 50 feet high, and the annual attendance at the festival was over 15,000 people.

10 Principles of the Burning Man (adapted from www.burningman.com):

• Radical Inclusion (no prerequisites exist for participation)
  
• Gifting(acts of unconditional gift giving)
  
• Decommodification (creation of social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising)
  
• Radical Self-reliance (encouraging an individual to discover, exercise, and rely on his or her inner resources
  
• Radical Self-expression (unique gifts of the individual, offered as a gift to others)
  
• Communal Effort (creative cooperation and collaboration)
  
• Civic Responsibility (assuming responsibility for public welfare and communicating civic responsibilities to participants
  
• Leaving No Trace (cleaning up after ourselves and leaving places in a better state than when we found them)
  
• Participation (everyone is invited to work, and everyone is invited to play)
  
• Immediacy (seeking to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves)

According to the Burning Man website, the event organizers "believe that the experience of Burning Man can produce positive spiritual change in the world," and "the touchstone of value in our culture will always be immediacy: experience before theory, moral relationships before politics, survival before services, roles before jobs, embodied ritual before symbolism, work before vested interest, participant support before sponsorship." In addition to the annual fire celebration, Burning Man is also a city in the desert, Black Rock, Nevada, about 120 miles north of Reno. Besides being dedicated to the annual festival, the community itself is dedicated to radical self-reliance and self-expression and art. The temporary community that springs up around the festival of the Burning Man includes many artistic endeavors such as innovative sculpture, performances, theme camps, art cars, and costumes. A few wacky traditions include an ice sculptor, a daily newspaper, nude croquet, nude limbo, motorized recliners, a body painter, and dancing around the bonfire left behind after the man is torched. When the final cinder turns to ash, festival organizers take care to ensure that the desert is left in exactly the same pristine condition they found it in. Event organizers claim, "No idea can substitute for this experience. We will always burn the Man."

The Burning Man is always set afire on the same day each year, the Saturday night before Labor Day. This year’s week-long celebration will be held from Monday, August 29th until Monday, September 5th, with the Man being burned on September 3rd. Past themes have included topics as diverse as Fertility, Outer Space, The Vault of Heaven, The Body, and Hell. The theme for 2005 is "Psyche: the Conscious, the Subconscious, and the Unconscious." The concept of the Burning Man and what he stands for is not only unique; it is different for everyone who participates. As the Burning Man website states, "Trying to explain what Burning Man is to someone who has never been to the event is a bit like trying to explain what a particular color looks like to someone who is blind." If you want to truly understand what the Burning Man is all about, you need to attend the event. You’ve never experienced anything like it, and you’ll never forget it.