British festival cultures are beginning to approximate an event that enjoys a special kind of status across the industry. Burning Man, an annual gathering of 65,000 staged on an empty lakebed in the Nevada desert, has often been described as a social experiment. Indeed, its own descriptions avoid using the term ‘festival’, preferring terms like ‘community’ or ‘city’ (Burning Man 2014). That it is a unique cultural event is not a romantic assertion: the gathering is an intricate sprawl of thumping encampments and mysterious, towering art installations, which together fashion a surreal display of colour against an otherwise arid landscape – something like a Salvador Dali painting made real.
It is foremost a celebration, incorporating hundreds of performances into five days of music, dancing and revelry. Frequently referred to as ‘Black Rock City’, or more simply, the ‘Playa’, its experimentalism is founded on a set of principles that are enshrined and protected in the way the event is organized and physically realized on site. Perhaps the most profound of these is ‘de-commodification’, a principle marked by the near-complete absence of commercial exchanges or bartering during the festivities. Nothing is bought or sold at Burning Man, with the exception of coffee and ice at a single encampment. The event is also built around the twin principles of democratized production and audience participation, which are sometimes expressed by the more exacting phrase, ‘No Spectators’. This statement is repeated in blogs, articles and the official website and forum, and printed on literature distributed at the festival. It informs not only its organizational shape and spatial arrangement of infrastructure on site, but also the way in which performance values are presented. With a conspicuous lack of advertised line-up billings, Burning Man rejects the notion of qualified performers in favour of a ground-level culture of performance. This anonymity has an equalizing effect, temporarily immunizing participants from the divisions inherent in the line-up-focused festivals that require celebrity, and virtuosity, to perform. In the absence of main-stage fanfare, the fusion of practices based around the ‘No Spectators’ idiom obligates festival-goers to contribute their time, creativity and labour. This is so ubiquitous in its achievement, that the perceptible differences between the producers and consumers of the event are largely eliminated.
With humble origins, the gathering has long been associated with a markedly creative ethos. It began with a single act of creative destruction. In 1986 Larry Harvey, who according to Clupper was an ‘under-employed’ landscape gardener at the time, built an eight-foot wooden effigy of a man with friend and carpenter Jerry James (Clupper 2007, 39). With a few more friends in tow, the effigy was taken to San Francisco’s Baker Beach, and once it was dark, it was ceremoniously burnt to the ground. This became something of a tradition, and in later years, rumour had it that the first burn symbolized the end of a relationship between Harvey and an unknown woman – though this was only speculation (Doherty 2004, 2). Humble as it was, the story of the first burn exemplifies the stark contrast between Burning Man’s blueprint and the concert-model formula: a line-up of conventional entertainment was replaced by the creation and destruction of the ‘Man’, a sculpture, born and executed by its makers. This occupies an important place in the festival’s authenticating narrative that sets it apart from other events. Harvey reports a deciding moment of unison between the few friends and family gathered at the first burn, a shared connection, or what one might describe as a moment of Durkheimian effervescence (Durkheim 1912, 236). The burning is out of the ordinary, a curious happening. At the time, the informal gathering was also the antithesis of the commercial opportunism that defined much of the concert and festival entertainment in the United States in the 1980s. Yet this was a moment of conception that had to be mythologized as pure, and as the event has grown, organizers have gone to some lengths to protect Burning Man from the ‘impure’, corrupting forces of human society – spawning interpretations of the event as a form of neo-spiritual worship (Gilmore 2005, 2008; Davis 2005). This exalted position is to some degree supported by the festival’s main organizer and protagonist: in Doherty’s history, Harvey reflects on the human tendency to mythologize moments of conception in order to enshrine them in cultural significance: ‘they want first causes in a mystical sense, as if everything radically emanate[s] from some singular and unconditionally real event’ (Doherty 2004, 25). This first gathering sits within a broader fabric of mystification that sets the scene for ritualized performances and practices at the festival.
Figure 5.1 ’Ouroboros’ by the Flipside CORE project, Burning Man 2011
Source: Ales Prikryl/DustToAshes.com
It would, of course, be erroneous to reduce Burning Man’s history to this first gathering without crediting the influence of pre-existing happenings, artistic scenes and festive events of the Californian avant-garde. It is predicated on the same kind of geo-cultural magnetism that most certainly flavoured, if not founded, both Woodstock and Glastonbury years earlier. Harvey was influenced by intellectuals that he knew, and artists – in particular the San Franciscan sculptor Mary Grauberger, who hosted art parties on the same beach as the so-called ‘first burn’. These parties often ended in the torching of sculptures (Doherty 2004, 27). Harvey attended some of these events and, according to Grauberger, was struck by the way that ‘you could be free, and not have an institution, and create incredible art and burn it’ (Doherty 2004). When the lucrative nature of Burning Man’s modern incarnation is considered, one could be forgiven for wondering whether financial opportunism actually was the real motivator of Harvey and James, two entrepreneurs who appropriated and then monetized what was essentially an unlicensed free festival. Yet in the immediate years after launching their own event it grew only very slowly, along with media coverage and contributions from local artists. It remained a tiny gathering for friends during its first three years, and by 1989, the crowd totalled only 300. By this time, the event was co-produced by Harvey and the Cacophony Society, an organization based around the principle of playfully disrupting daily routines. This relationship marked an alignment of the gathering with the idea of ‘poetic terrorism’, or subversion through art, that later became important to both the squatting and rave movements in 1990s Britain (Bey 1991). Bey’s manifesto went on to conceptualize the TAZ – Temporary Autonomous Zone – as a critical space for unmitigated, unlicensed gathering (often in abandoned and unlicensed premises). Yet the Cacophony was also firmly focused on the absurd: in 1993 a paper reported that the Society had its members dress up as clowns and alight a public bus from multiple stops, gradually filling up the bus, to the bemusement of the driver and the other passengers (Dunham 1993). As one Cacophony member summed up in the article, ‘too much of life is just too serious’ (Dunham 1993). On the Society’s website, it is described as the following:
[The Cacophony Society is a] loosely-structured network of individuals, banded together – as our name suggests – by a common love of cultural noise: belief systems, aesthetics, and ways of living striking a note of discord against prevailing harmonies. (Cacophony Society)
Despite the light-hearted and comedic ethos of the group, its relationship with the Burn helped to crystallize a particular aim, and a methodology for achieving it: to detach participants from the ‘prevailing harmonies’ of the world outside through interventionist and immersive performance. One of these ‘harmonies’ was the separation of consumers from cultural production, a perceived malaise the festival attempts to turn on its head.
In Harvey’s own lecture posted on the official website in 2000, Burning Man is portrayed as a participant-focused event from its earliest years (Burning Man 2014). Held in suitably industrial locations, illegal parties the Society dubbed ‘The Atomic Café’, held between 1989 and 1992, were informally themed events ‘premised on the notion that a nuclear war had occurred’ (Burning Man 2014). As would grow characteristic of the later Burning Man events, the animation of theme by attendees, whether through costume or spontaneous performance, was crucial: as Harvey described in his lecture, ‘the idea with Cacophony was always that you were the entertainment. You make your own show’ (2000). The centrality of the participant coincided with a relational approach to aesthetics in the art world, and as was later defined in the seminal work of Bourriaud, this scene took direct, human interactions as its theoretical horizon (Bourriaud 2006, 160). In this respect, the early Burning Man events were rearticulating the challenges to spectatorship present in the related spheres of both contemporary art and theatre. The event’s emphasis on relational situations, like the art Bourriaud describes, legitimized unconventional spaces as forums for art by collapsing the ‘pseudo-artistic’ notions of how art should be exhibited (Bourriaud 2006). In the performing arts, this also paralleled the pursuit of an emancipating form of theatre aligned with an ideal of the empowered audience, ‘where spectators will no longer be spectators, where they will … become active participants in collective performance’ (Rancière 2004). In contemporary Britain, this rationale has become a significant influence on theatrical performances, so much so that both the Independent and the Guardian newspapers have criticized immersive theatre as ‘unavoidable’ (Jones 2013; Gardner 2014). As the latter article acknowledged, however, immersive theatre is only noticeably popular in the nation’s capital: in many regions it still remains a rather exotic alternative to the presentational theatre-format.
The principle of immersion as the basis for genres of art and theatre is now beginning to define a particular genre of music festival within the boutique sector, of which there are leaders, adopters and adapters. For the events that can be placed within this genre, which includes both British and other European events, Burning Man has acted as a forerunner, exemplifying methods for cultivating highly complex, audience-produced event experiences. In Britain, the growing trends within the boutique and independent festival movement, in particular the thematic design, democratized production and costume culture found there, implicitly express values that have always been core to the event. There is a rapid exchange of ideas accelerating their development, particularly with regards to their visual and participatory milieu – complex decor, concept staging,1 installation artworks, novel games and encampments, and the theatrical clothing worn by performance artists and ordinary festival-goers. Many of these features embody principles allied to the principle of ‘No Spectators’ and the larger set of doctrinal positions expounded by Burning Man, and as is discussed in the following two chapters, this is not a purely coincidental phenomenon for the events are part of the same value-oriented, participatory scene. The fragmentation of festival space, the diversification of festival arts and the promotion of extreme participation at festivals in Britain have been buoyed by the high level of inter-festival rivalry which has provided commercial and idealistic motivations for the transatlantic exchange of ideas. In this context, Burning Man represents an intriguing aberration: despite the sequestered location, and its complete lack of advertising and artist billings, it has grown increasingly popular since its inception in 1986. It has attained status in doing the impossible, for it is a major bacchanalian festival that exists firmly outside of the formulaic star system usually required to sell tickets to events with coinciding appeal. Though listening and dancing to music remains a principal element, Burning Man’s approach reverses the normative performance hierarchies of festival convention by sidelining the centrality and dominance of featured line-ups. In a determined rejection of celebrity (at least, of the kind of celebrity that is limited to the few), music forms the soundtrack to a fragmentary, and immersive, theatrical milieu.
Burning Man is a festival that takes the theatrical trends identified in the last chapter to some extreme, for costumes and interactive installations, for example, are presented not as simple entertainment but also as expressions of a system of clearly articulated values. In that sense, the festival takes on a self-conscious, ennobled role of the parallel society, challenging the quotidian through its reversal. And yet, this parallel society also mimics, as well as manipulates, ways in which people organize: it both ‘renounces and announces’ culture (Falassi 1987, 3). At Burning Man festival-goers are citizens, with a responsibility to uphold the values of their ‘city’:
Burning Man isn’t your usual festival, with big acts booked to play on massive stages. In fact, it’s more of a city than a festival, wherein almost everything that happens is created entirely by its citizens, who are active participants in the event. (Burningman.org 2014)
The above description, featured on the home-page of the Burning Man website, alludes to the event’s characteristic mixture of civic organization and audience-produced features. There is a cluster of meanings implied by this description: that usual festivals are predicated on a form of presentational performance; that Burning Man presents an alternative to this performance convention; and that it does so by assuming a different kind of format. Burning Man’s self-description ultimately reveals an idealizing position: by crediting its construction to the audience, it is celebrating its own status as an equalizer of producers and consumers. Of course, the implied subtext is that the concert-style event is exactly the opposite – an inhibiting kind of performance genre. There is a sense that by focusing mostly on the main stage and its reception, ‘usual festivals’ are an allegory of the world outside; mimicking its flaws, instead of subverting them, limiting the potential of audiences and reinforcing a spatially reinforced separation between them and the performers on stage. Burning Man’s idealized celebration of the active participant in the excerpt matches an ethos that is annually reproduced in the wider discourses surrounding the event: permeating both marketing materials and event design is a critical distinction between the passive and the active as modes of audience engagement. Outside of Burning Man, this distinction is frequently echoed within realms as varied as politics, art and education, drawing upon a wider series of relations between alienation and self-possession, image and living reality, each of which install it with critical meaning (Rancière 2008) Problematically, if total passivity is a mythical construction, on what basis, then, does activity rest? In the politics of Burning Man this issue hinges on systems of dominance in the production of culture: a kind of passivity does exist, and it is signalled by the absence of audience contributions to the visible and tangible cultural products it consumes. On site at the festival, redemptive participatory activities can be unpacked via nuanced conceptions of the immersive, the relational and the interactive, though they are united by an ideal of extreme participation that resonates with the logic of Biocca, discussed in Chapter 1: audience activity should be equated not only with bodily and individual expression, but also with an imperative degree of systemic control (Biocca 1998, 61). Modes of engagement that allow the audience to play a role in creating the festival it consumes – or ‘prosumption’, as Chen has put it, is the observable outcome of a discourse engendered not only by the text-based artifacts relating to the event, but by the shape of its social milieu (Chen 2012, 570–95).
Figure 5.2 The Man, at the centre of Black Rock City, 2009
Source: Ales Prikryl/DustToAshes.com
Space has a defining influence on audience participation, and because of this, the choice and arrangement of infrastructure at Burning Man renders this element one of careful design. On the dry expanse that forms the event’s canvas, the monolithic main stage of a conventional music festival is conspicuously absent; instead, convivial space is made up of a milieu of small tents, stages and geodesic structures littered in close proximity across the sand. Burning Man theme camps and residences are arranged in a semicircular configuration, beyond which lie weird and beautiful works of art, most of which can be touched, or climbed onto, or used as shelter. As is shown in Figure 5.2, symbolically placed at the centre of this ethereal terrain is a towering wooden effigy – the Man. During the charged bacchanal on the Saturday night of the festival, he is ceremoniously burnt to the ground. Longitude and latitude are replaced with ‘times’ on a ‘clock’. Hundreds of features, lacking clear demarcations on the land aside from makeshift signage, are marked out on upon a clock-face map given to attendees as they enter. ‘Avenues’ and ‘streets’ are labeled in accordance with a theme, which is renewed each year.
Volunteers create the bulk of the structures, which house thousands of activities, performances and entertainments. Through the collapse of producer and consumer distinction, there follows another kind of spatial dissolution as the boundary between public and private habitation becomes blurred. Spending time in theme camps or elaborately presented ‘art cars’, built and decorated by participants, has the feel of sharing private – or at least personal – space. There are diverse occupants, who are united by a willingness to endure the hardships of the desert for the sake of the experience. During the day, the heat rises to an intensity that is difficult to bear; likewise, the temperature drop at night is severe. The notion that these conditions have a distilling effect on the audience is an interesting one, for the harshness of the desert helps to preserve a committed populace through screening out ‘casual observers’, would-be Burners that may not support the core principles. There is a financial aspect to this too: expenditure on travel to reach the event from far-flung places can total thousands of pounds; a sizeable cost matched by the psychological and physical demands of desert life. There is little logic in spending such sums, without some identification with the founding principles. Yet the spatial location of Burning Man is a necessary one for practical reasons too: it makes sense to assume that the desert is the only kind of landscape where the state authorities would be willing to allow the burning of vast art installations, and other legally questionable (and potentially dangerous) behaviour. That so many thousands are willing to spend a week in the desert with extremely limited facilities testifies to the considerable dedication and reverence attached to the freedom of experience that this venue permits; yet it also suggests their complicity with the event’s emphasis on commitment over convenience.
Figure 5.3 Aerial view of Burning Man
Source: Ales Prikryl/DustToAshes.com
At the event, idealism, practice and legal compliance must be carefully balanced, for despite its sequestered location, Burning Man is subject to state and federal law like any other form of public entertainment in the United States. As a consequence its organizing entity Black Rock City LLC (BRCLLC hereafter), has had to negotiate a path between order and disorder and compromise with the authoritative agencies and ‘conservative elements’ to which it is legally beholden (Fortunati 2005, 157). Black Rock Land Management, a regional organization, with the US federal government, maintain the authority to control and protect the land, while law enforcement agencies regularly patrol the event. It is likely that plain-clothes officers are in attendance, indeed, in 2009, one participant was fined for supplying alcohol to a minor by an undercover cop, and there were a further eight arrests for undisclosed reasons. Police presence was probably less forceful in the early years, but as the festival has grown the authorities have come to exert significant pressure on BRCLLC to comply with various regulations relating to its entertainment licence. According to one source, the company has not only had to pour considerable finance into public relations in order to appease these agencies, but its efforts to accommodate them have invariably led to a transformation of the event (Fortunati 2005). This has resulted in a smooth operation, though whether the contemporary festival has become a more obedient replica of its anarchic antecedent is a matter of annual debate, particularly given its wealthy clientele. It can, nonetheless, still be considered one of the, if not the, most successful integrations of legal requirements, aesthetics and socio-political values. It has evolved a necessarily systemic, and in many ways predictable, ‘skeleton’, yet the audience-generated variation within this framework reproduces spontaneity and individuality on the level of experience. The demographic make-up of participants has undoubtedly changed over time as Burning Man has grown into an event of global repute. Doherty references an earlier time when he claims that the event ‘tiptoes a knife edge between two dominant alternative outlooks in American underground culture … roughly characterized as punk and hippie’ (Doherty 2004, 169). By the 1990s, Joanne Northrup observed that she was ‘surrounded by an astonishing amount of wealth [at Burning Man] owing to the economic boom of the late 1990s’ (Northrup 2005, 140). Claiming that the event was no longer based on a majority of ‘unemployed poets’, she also realized that Burning Man had transformed into a globally recognized attraction (Northrup 2005, 140). From my perspective, on attending in 2009, a middle- to upper-class, international crowd populated the event; there were affluent and educated attendants of a broad age range, which seemed rather at odds with media allusions to its neo-pagan, anarchic nature. It is conceivable that the media regularly distort and overstate the anarchic dimension of the event and its patrons, for in 2001 a survey found that information and computer technology was, by that time, one of the two largest sectors occupied by Burning Man’s participants (the other was the arts) (Fortunati 2005, 160). Later studies have noted the continued colonization of the event by software engineers, coders and California’s well-paid digerati (Rey 2013).
The high-tech industries of Silicon Valley have become culturally and historically entangled with the event; indeed, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin – the very architects of the global search engine – used an illustration of Burning Man’s focal installation as the very first embellishment of their now-universally recognized logo, in order to mark their attendance at the event in August 1998. That Brin and Page were once regular attendants at the event is a generally known and regularly reported fact. To the knowledge of the author, there are no interviews that go into detail about their individual motivations to attend, or their experiences at the festival, but they are part of a wider relationship between the festival and the workforce at Silicon Valley. It may seem remarkable that rich, ‘nerdy’ types populate such a radically idealistic and countercultural style event, however, some illuminating parallels have been drawn between the virtual commons that has underpinned the development of Silicon Valley technologies and the spatial commons that is Burning Man. Technologists are drawn to participating at Burning Man, according to Turner, because the celebration is ‘somehow like the internet’ (Turner 2009, 16). The two realms have become entangled, he argues, because they are both based on peer production and the creative autonomy of individuals: in both, there is a conscious encouragement to conflate work and leisure, to transform work into leisure, and vice versa. This resonates because of the ways in which the context both resembles and departs from the day-to-day technologists’ work and leisure practices, offering a similar ‘commons’ framework with a different means for achieving status:
Like multi-player online role-playing games or open-source projects in various fields, Burning Man is becoming a site at which the traditional features of artistic bohemias – collaborative commons, visibility, subsidy, project labour, and the fused pursuit of self-improvement, craft and reputation – help structure the manufacture of new information goods. (Turner 2009, 28)
Burning Man provided, however, a context that was much more playful, and more conspicuous, than what was on offer in the workplace. Beyond the integration of high-tech workers, the audience at Burning Man is hard to pigeonhole; as Harvey described, it is ‘multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and represents a wide range of age groups’, approximating ‘the great ecumenical world that surrounds us’ (Harvey 2000). Some are searching for sexual liberation, others are more likely to be interested in the artistic and political appeal of the event; still others may consider their attendance a spiritual act. The significant costs associated with attendance, both physical and financial, nonetheless suggest that attendees share an affinity with the event that is powerful, and the internationality of the crowd suggests it provides something not easily found at home. Despite the geographic disparateness of international attendees, they are united by factors that can be interpreted as ‘neo-tribal’; it is the ‘ambiences, feelings and emotions’ that invite them to consider attendance a worthwhile experience (Maffesoli 1996, 11). The full range of motivations that influence Burners is potentially broad, yet the valuing of Burning Man as a kind of aesthetic or spiritual pilgrimage that provides emotional sustenance during the rest of the year is a recurring theme. This is supported by Katherine Chen’s investigation of volunteer motivations, as one of her respondents states, ‘Burning Man allows me to have the sanity to make it through the year … should that be taken away, [the job] wouldn’t be worth it’ (Chen 2009, 118). In this respect, it is a cathartic ‘safety-valve’, as has been theorized of various festival events, an unleashing of hedonistic energy, temporary compensation for the restrictive and routinized reality of their daily regime (Burke 2002, 202; Gluckman 1954, in Guss 2000, 12).
The event and its patrons mediate respective values, offering, perhaps, some logical criteria on which to define the audience: this predominantly Californian group is liberal, eco-conscious, and not averse to socio-political discussion. It can be assumed that most of them would reject traditional two-party politics, though their values are more consistent with the left than with the right. Audience commonalities are analogous to the ethos that attracts them: they value art and act out the desire to aestheticize life. In this sense, participants are part of a neo-bohemian culture, i.e. one associated with a countercultural lifestyle and the artistic workers of the creative class. Nailing down a common audience profile may be as fruitless as pinpointing an ‘essential’ nature of the festival, when in fact it is fluid and has changed over time. What is clear, nonetheless, is that this sequestered space has attracted attendees from widely divergent backgrounds, from anarchistic punks to some of the highest paid blue chip workers in the world. The audience at Burning Man come together to witness a unique and awesome spectacle, but also, to challenge the notion of spectatorship by implicitly supporting a critical space that challenges the conventions of presentational performance found elsewhere in festival and concert culture.
Burning Man is as potent in its critical discourse as it is in its aesthetic statement. Championing a repertoire of 10 principles, there is a clear attempt to synthesize ideological tenets, programming and production into a comprehensively participative system paralleling the world outside, whereby each player has an individual role. The principles champion roles that permit creativity and autonomy, though these are not unbridled freedoms but rather are mitigated by the needs of the community. As a result, the principles form a common doctrine, emphasizing social responsibility and citizenship as well as the creative ‘rights’ of the individual. The 10 organizing principles of Burning Man are listed below, in the order they appear on the event’s website:
• Radical Inclusion
• Gifting
• Decommodification
• Radical Self-Reliance
• Radical Self-Expression
• Communal Effort
• Civic Responsibility
• Participation
• Immediacy.
It is impossible to consider these principles in complete isolation from each other when describing the Burning Man ethos, and that is because they express intertwined ideals. For example, gifting and de-commodifiation are closely related because one principle is a practical method for achieving the other; in other words, gifting is what allows participants to experience a de-commodified space. Collectively, however, each principle is a nuanced way of expressing one unashamedly utopian vision of Burning Man society that is the driving force behind the event.
These principles today have a defining influence on the global media’s interpretation of Burning Man and its cultural significance, though they were conspicuously defined quite late on in the festival’s history – 2004. The official festival website states that they were initially written by co-founder Harvey for the Regional Network, a network comprised of affiliated events which were increasing in number at the time. The principles are also presented as guidelines, not strictures: ‘crafted not as a dictate of how people should be and act, but as a reflection of the community’s ethos and culture as it had organically developed since the event’s inception’ (Burning Man 2004). Burning Man’s history since 1986 testifies to the distillation of these principles over time as the celebration developed its identity, though they were not always articulated with such clarity. There are also other slogans that express coinciding values, which have not made it onto the official list (‘No Spectators’, for example, does not appear on this list but is printed on various literature, and expresses the same principle of ‘Participation’).
On site at the Burn, the ban on commercial exchange, in support of the principle of de-commodification, is simultaneously unsettling and liberating. Being unable to purchase convenience is a restriction many Westerners are not used to, but it is exactly this restriction that stimulates the collaboration of individuals while promoting ‘Radical Self Reliance’. Excluding the purchase of tea, coffee and ice from central camp, nothing can be purchased on the festival site. The near-total absence of monetary transactions on site radically alters the festival experience and represents a celebratory model that is remarkably different. There is no point in carrying money, as it cannot buy you anything, and the lack of signal eliminates the possibility of arranging casual meetings through SMS or phone calls. Needless to say, the Internet is similarly inaccessible on site. Most of the time, participants wander across large expanses of land without the valuable appendages of mobile phones and wallets, and as a consequence, the ever-present wariness of theft vanishes. This is a small but significant detail: while carrying cash, cards and sophisticated mobile technology, it is, logically, more difficult to truly let go and distance oneself from the everyday. It is impossible to discern the base sense of responsibility such objects incur, until it is temporarily removed. At Burning Man, festival experience is not punctuated by purchases, and participants become temporarily detached from the material belongings that would, in the outside world, rarely leave their side.
It is, to a large extent, debatable how far Burning Man was introducing something radically new with the principle of de-commodification; for in fact, the site-wide absence of monetary transactions references an entrenched ethos of free festival culture. Hetherington, for example, claims that the term ‘free festival’ has always logically implied an alternative to the commercial event. He states:
Free festivals developed not only as a critique of the larger commercial festivals but also as a utopian model of alternative society, aiming to offer an ethos of freedom from constraints and an economy based on reciprocity and gift and around principles of mutual aid rather than money. (Hetherington 2000, 48)
It is only the formal structure of BRCLLC that prevents Burning Man from coinciding wholly with Hetherington’s conceptualization. And therein lies a clue to what the event does remarkably well: it integrates structure and anti-structure, hegemonic complicity and counter-hegemonic disruption. As Hetherington described of the free festival movement, a gift economy similarly based on reciprocity evolved. Yet Burning Man takes this to a systemic extreme. BRCLLC has foregone the receipt of income from pitch fees; that is, cash that would normally be paid by vendors in exchange for allowing them to sell food, drink and other goods on site (of course, it is also true that the banning of commerce maintains a unique and ticket-selling brand). In the absence of vendors, there are ‘happy hours’ at different theme camps which dispense food and drink, including alcoholic drink, at no charge – these provisions are usually paid for by the theme camp creators; gifted, in other words. Pre-event literature advises participants to bring a drink-refillable plastic beaker for all the gifted refills they will receive across the site. The enshrinement of ‘Gifting’ and ‘De-commodification’ is certainly a major factor in Burning Man’s cultural positioning as a carnivalesque social experiment. Describing the festival to those who have not witnessed it for themselves, it is the total and unapologetic rejection of commerce on site that always shocks and intrigues the listener.
Notions of citizenship and collective duty underpin the principles of ‘Radical Inclusion’, ‘Communal Effort’ and ‘Civic Responsibility’. The very repetition of these notions through these nuanced expressions drives home the importance of each participant’s contribution to the whole. It clarifies the rationale for the event – that it is an experiment in collective, as oppose to selective, action, and that this can only be achieved with members of the whole in tacit agreement. ‘Civic Responsibility’, together with the full 10 principles, extends to all affiliated Burner events: as the website states, ‘community members … must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws’ (Burning Man 2004). Obligations to comply with the lead organization as well as governmental legislation may seem at odds with the festival’s more anarchic roots, yet it ought to be viewed as a pragmatic way of limiting liability should any affiliates deviate from the law, and as a preventative measure, by making it clear to the public where the company stands on this issue. Yet what is a more powerful outcome of these encouragements is the way in which ground level co-operation is stimulated in the run up to the festival, and at the live event. Labour is both cast and experienced in a particular way, a way that was once peculiar to the Burn, but is now an emergent feature of British festival culture. Some form of work, whether creative or practical or administrative, becomes fundamental to the full and authentic Burning Man experience: the act of consumption requires doing, whether that is volunteering in a fancy dress boutique, creating an art car, gifting food or perhaps a lesson in life to a passer-by. As is consistent with the egalitarian ethos of the event, this obligation incorporates all participants. In practice, the attempt to mobilize such huge numbers has thrown up practical difficulties, and despite the event’s continuous reinforcement of the importance of civic contribution, the threat of the uninitiated masses diluting the Burner culture is one that appears to have grown in recent years (and is discussed at greater length, on pp. xxx–xxx).
One form of mobilized action has worked particularly well, and that is the action arising from the principle ‘Leaving No Trace’. This is one strand of civic responsibility regarding the land on which the festival is staged. The mantra ‘Leave No Trace’ or ‘Leaving No Trace’ is not unique to Burning Man, though its origins are unknown. In the UK, these phrases are reprinted in programmes, posters and signs for the purpose of encouraging festival-goers to proactively collaborate with promoters in the live and post-event clear-up, which is often an enormous, expensive and time-consuming task. Burning Man’s refusal to manage the majority of festival-goer rubbish (with the exception of human waste), and the conspicuous absence of dustbins for general use, is unique, however, and surprising: all theme camps and participants are obliged to haul their own waste back out from the desert and to a local waste-sorting site. Such an approach to site-wide waste management seems inconceivable elsewhere. The decrease in event costs that invariably results from such an action might invite cynical interpretations; indeed it is without doubt that the transfer of responsibility from organizers to participants is demonstrative of the audience’s compliance with rules that are conducive to their own labour. Yet there is a strong level of support for the ‘Leave No Trace’ scheme – in part because it is a practical manifestation of the other principles (Radical Self-Reliance, Civic Responsibility), and in part because of the eco-conscious demographic that are drawn to the event in the first instance. The arrangement does, however, reiterate the power of an ethical stance, as Kate Oakley similarly found in her research on British festival workers, in invoking free labour and support (Oakley 2007).
Similarly unconventional is the praxis that upholds the principle of immediacy, described as the most ‘important touchstone of value in our culture’ (Burning Man 2004). This principle relates to the critical distinction between the producer and consumer that underpins so much Burner discourse, but also, the socially constructed barriers ‘that stand between us’ (Burning Man 2004). It is perhaps the more ambiguous of the 10 principles, and philosophical: immediacy seeks to tear through the Dubordian spectacle by transforming mitigated ideas into real, direct experiences. Again, the principle of immediacy is focused on superseding the traditional idea of the ‘audience’ through encouraging a culture that is free, collaborative, expressive and relational. The task of maintaining an experience of free and uncontrolled spontaneity, while retaining levels of programme quality and fulfilling the requirements of government, insurers and other stakeholders, is not an easy one. This is because there is a conflict between the ideal of immediacy, and what regulatory organizations are conditioned to impose. The socio-political stance articulated by Burning Man’s founder goes so far as to depict the mediation of personal safety through regulatory bodies as symptomatic of a broad, systemic inducement of passivity over self-reliance. Again, Rancière’s allegories of inequality are present here; while mediated safety is viewed as a control mechanism that incapacitates social actors, an escape from this system is considered emancipating through reconciling celebrants with control (2008). Freedom from a blandly predictable, molly-coddled world predicated by licensing laws and health and safety protocols is attempted in the creation of a space where participants are responsible for themselves, and where the control of personal safety is not outsourced to the BRCLLC or law enforcement. And yet, the event must promote legal and regulatory compliance for its own preservation. Interestingly, a solution has been found: clearing a path for immediacy through the employment of legal means, a disclaimer requires a signature from all participants on entry to the event. This reasserts the principle of immediacy to participants, it allows the organization to evade certain protocols and, crucially, it helps protect BRCLLC from harmful litigation that could arise from a health and safety incident. An additional disclaimer displayed on the event ticket states that assuming responsibility for the risks encountered at the event through the purchase of a ticket ‘release[s] Burning Man from any claim arising from this risk’. In 2009, I observed this disclaimer making room for an apparently meaningful and direct experience, which made some sense of its utilization; participants were allowed to stand in close proximity to hot ashes following the all-important burning of the ‘man’. Elsewhere, the health and safety protocols of an event would require areas of potential danger to be immediately rectified by site crew, or cordoned off and separated from participants. Despite the apparent superficiality of this detail, the solemnity of those gathered at the ashes demonstrated a case whereby the enshrinement of immediacy had made room for action meaningful to participants, whether or not this action is interpretable in terms of spiritual practice. The proximity permitted here coincides again with the relational principle that closes the physical separations between art and its audience.
‘Participation’ is perhaps the widest, most overarching of the 10 principles, though it is clear that this also interlocks with all of the others – in particular, with ‘Radical Self-Expression’. The former, as described on the website, relates to contributions that are ‘deeply personal’; the latter is elaborated in similar terms, as arising from the ‘unique gifts of the individual’ (Burring Man 2004). In simple terms, it means getting involved and making (gifting) a contribution, though the type of contribution is intentionally left open for individual creativity. These two principles articulate the stance of ‘No Spectators’, which has become something of a popular slogan as a means to emphasis the principles below:
People new to Burning Man often assume that it’s a regular ‘festival’ as they’ve come to know them, a mostly passive experience where everything is planned, orchestrated and pre-packaged by the event producers, and attendees just come and enjoy the show. In fact, the exact opposite is true … the people who attend Burning Man are no mere ‘attendees’, but rather are active participants in every sense of the word: they create the city, the interaction, the art, the performance and ultimately the ‘experience’. (Burningman.org 2014)
Once more, the same set of associations is powerfully apparent: the cerebral actions that allow one to ‘watch’ are equated with passivity, while the celebrated mode of participation is one that exerts control over the structure of the event. Burners are exposed to the ‘No Spectators’ slogan before they arrive at the festival, for it is printed in conspicuous text on the ticket. Given the risks associated with the location the majority of newcomers to the festival consult the website to help organize their trip, where the slogan can also be viewed. Participants are then confronted by the ‘No Spectators’ idiom in action, the moment they enter the Playa and encounter groups of fancy-dressed ‘greeters’. On my arrival there in 2009, the greeters forced ‘virgin Burners’ to exit the coach as it waited in the entry queue, and submit to a mildly degrading but humorous initiation procedure that involved rolling about on the desert floor in front of the veterans who remained on the bus. I was gently castigated for my comfortable, though distinctly plain, attire, while other greeters shouted ‘YOU are the performers!’ intermittently. This was a friendly humiliation that reminded me of freshman initiations. At Burning Man, it was a practice that was not only characteristic of the ‘No Spectators’ ethos, but also, perhaps, quintessentially American. Upon induction to the encampment, which was organized by a San Franciscan hostel and tour company, Green Tortoise, our group was informed that they were expected to participate in cooking and cleaning, despite having paid $300 for their catering services. It soon became clear that the ‘No Spectators’ idiom extended to all possible areas, from the minutiae of individual dress to the site-wide gift economy. The Burning Man founders might avoid the term ‘ideology’ when describing the role of the 10 principles in shaping their event, yet there is a deliberate socio-political flavour to their presentation and adoption, that is also undeniably utopian, in their championing of a commerce-free space that is both collectively produced, and collectively performed. They are expounded in a way that is difficult to ignore, by even the most reluctant of festival-goers, who by entering the Playa take on the responsibility of maintaining its values. Taken together, the way in which Burning Man’s principles are earnestly enshrined and then tangibly manifested has created a systemic model for what has been described as a ‘do-ocracy’ (Chen 2009, 42, 80).
Burning Man’s do-ocracy culminates in a patchwork of entertainments, where it is possible to find, as Michaelson has observed, more or less anything you’d find in an established metropolitan city: ‘art, museums, dance clubs, yoga studios – only in the middle of the desert’ (Michaelson 2009). Careful site planning is balanced with a minutiae of individualized detail found in the participant-led theme camps and villages, which are each encouraged to support the 10 principles of the festival through fostering expression, participation and individualized contributions. Memorably named camps at the 2010 event included the ‘LEtsGO Lounge’ (a place to relive your childhood with your favourite plastic building blocks), ‘Liminal Labs’ (a Psycho-Geographic Society interactive mapping project) and the ‘Love Puddle Playground’ (with four square, tether ball and dildo jousting billed as featured activities). More recent theme camps include the Barbie Death Camp, Bass Henge and Better Bunny Bureau, and many others (Burning Man 2015)
The deployment of audience-led theme camps within a democratized production model has been described as a (often tense) combination of collectivist and bureaucratic practices (Chen 2005, 80). To the naked eye, Burning Man certainly lends itself to an appearance of the participant produced, though its organizing entity comprises a structure typical of a festival organization – whereby a small team of waged employees deploy the labour of a much larger pool of transient, temporary and seasonal workers. Though most music festivals rely on voluntary support, there are two related aspects regarding the way in which this support is deployed at Burning Man that is unconventional: firstly, the labour takes on specific, socio-political dimensions through its enshrinement in the ‘No Spectators’/’Participation’ praxis, and secondly, some volunteers are also ticket-buyers. The latter point is worth emphasizing: despite paying $300–$400 to attend, plus travel costs, there is an encouragement to undertake tasks that would normally be shouldered by the organization, or by volunteers working in exchange for a free ticket. Although audience labour is widespread, quantifying exactly how much of it is responsible for the creation of the event is not an exact science. Though the Burning Man website states that it takes only 2,000 volunteers to build and run the event site, this categorization appears to exclude large areas of production and is limited to those working in practical and administrative areas of voluntary production, for example, box office sales, information desk and clean-up operations. Volunteers are able to work for the ‘Burning Man Art Team’, though this team is not involved in the design or creation of any installations. Contributions that include creative work such as designing art installations, theme camps, mutant vehicles or live performances are not organized under the volunteer recruitment drive, as these areas are developed through separate methods of contributor application, and the number of voluntary labourers involved in these areas is not published by the organization. Whatever the true figure may be, it is certain that the number of participants involved in creating the event is much larger than 2,000. Fortunati, basing her figures on a 2001 audience survey of the event (which drew a crowd of 25,659), claimed that 79 per cent of total respondents had collaborated with other people in an organized camp or theme camp to share resources, 14 per cent had undertaken volunteer work prior to the event, while 39 per cent had undertaken volunteer work while at the event (Fortunati 2005, 159). If these proportions have remained the same, Burning Man today utilizes the labour of at least 25,000 of its 65,000-attendee population, and likely more – an enormous figure and a highly irregular feature of the celebration. Yet it is this unique proportionality that generates its palpable atmosphere of collective production.
BRCLLC’s focus on basic infrastructure build, legal compliance and quality control testifies to its position as the curator: in essence, Burning Man is a blank canvas annually animated by independent artists, performers and collectives. The event is also unconventional in allowing volunteers to take on roles with high levels of responsibility, who are often enlisted to work as co-coordinators and managers. In the past, volunteers have for example been responsible for the drafting of legal documentation for the festival; and today, many of the skilled teams on site are also comprised of volunteers (Chen 2009, 80–1).2 Elsewhere in the festival market volunteers are traditionally utilized only for low-skilled and low-risk work such as stewarding or box office sales, and high levels of volunteer unreliability (from which Burning Man is far from exempt) often necessitates this. Since volunteers are labouring for their ticket, delegating a low-skilled role that is nonetheless key to the smooth running of the event means that the place can be filled with ease should the volunteer pull out or go ‘off the radar’ at the live event. However, Burning Man is unique in delegating skilled work – that being the case, how does it function, considering the fact that volunteers have little to lose by not showing up to work? According to Chen (2005), this has represented a challenge to the organization, and indeed, it is certainly arguable that the difficulties in motivating and retaining volunteers undermines the extent to which the ‘No Spectators’ ideal is practically realized; that herein lies the earthly limitations of achieving the participatory utopia. Cultivating commitment and reliability in the absence of hard cash is no easy task: Chen presents, for example, a report of one co-coordinator that recruited 150 volunteers, only to find that none of them turned up to fulfil their required training. This was further exacerbated by the fact that without financial rewards, there was ‘diminished authority to demand accountability and timeliness’ (Chen 2005, 111). One of the organization’s remedial measures was overcompensating for the numbers lost by multiplying the number recruited, and reinforcing responsibilities through improved communications. Interestingly, some practical tasks have necessarily had to be recast within entertaining theme camps in order to attract and to retain volunteers; the task of ice hauling, for example, after suffering from considerable numbers of absentees, began to incorporate an element of play and theatricality simply to make the work more attractive. In many ways, this is the secret to mobilizing the Burning Man crowd, for it is easier to foster motivation when the work feels like play.
It is not possible to theatricalize every task, however, and Burning Man has also come to rely on many paid, specialist roles in addition to unpaid volunteers. Mimicking the world outside, financial incentives are used to ‘induce recipients to more highly prioritize their contributions to the organization’ (Chen 2005, 123). And so, despite the emphases on civic responsibilities and gifting, the operation required to create Burning Man cannot succeed without the levels of commitment brought about through traditional incentives that are integral to the external systems of financial reward the festival attempts to sideline. This could be interpreted as a crack in the utopian vision: despite the enshrinement of a space free of monetary transactions, it is largely the lack of money-for-work, stable exchanges that threaten the smooth running of the festival. Yet it is ordinary, not ideal, human beings that create Burning Man, and the fact that roughly half of the ticket-buying population does gift their labour remains an uncommon abnormality. Of course, the impracticalities of fully realizing a gifted ‘do-ocracy’ stems from the fact that some roles will require far more skill, hours and levels of personal commitment than others, and for certain roles, the use of volunteers over paid personnel would undoubtedly make the event less safe and smooth-running for the community as a whole. It would also be unrealistic, perhaps, to expect participants not to bring with them behaviours and assumptions conditioned by the world outside, to assume they are able to leave at the gates the principles of exchange that underpin their lives the remaining 360 days of the year. Taking a wider perspective, although the festival is inevitably beholden to the norms entrenched in its external social context, there is ample room for more cynical interpretations of Burning Man’s do-ocracy – as it is one that outsources much of the event’s production to attendees without forfeiting income from ticket sales. As Oakley has noted of the British festival industry, the discourses that emphasize the non-financial rewards of volunteering, particularly those emanating from the organizational core of the festival, constitute a form of rhetoric – ‘soften[ing] the reality of what is often hard, unpaid or low paid work’ (Oakley 2007).
That the impression of collective production masks, rather than erodes, the ‘real’ distinctions between ‘festival organizers, traders, performers and volunteers’, is a view not without credibility (Oakley 2007). Writing anonymously in the New Mission News, a critic of Burning Man hinted at the way in which maximized volunteer productivity helps maximize ticket sales in a way that is disingenuous: stating that its founder ‘[takes] advantage of volunteer’s desire for self-actualization’, the article goes on to claim that ‘Harvey has succeeded in convincing work-shy bohemians that toiling in the desert can somehow lead to personal fulfillment’ (Chen 2009, 47). The conventional reality of Burning Man’s private ownership structure, which has legally assigned the control of profits to its shareholders and not the much-touted ‘community’, also compounds this view.3 It is also highly significant that former festival organizer John Law, who helped develop the festival through his involvement in the Cacophony Society, later denigrated the event for profiting – allegedly, by $8 million a year – through using the unpaid labour of the ‘poor and less-employed’ (Chen 2009, 48). He argued that it was the less affluent volunteers who were donating long stretches of time to constructing the festival, while the rich ‘dot com kids and hippies’ were making only weekend visits (Chen 2009). Ultimately Law claimed that Burning Man was ethically troubling because its business model subsidized the experiences of the rich, through eliciting extensive contributions from the poor. While these claims are severe indeed, it is important that they are, however, taken in context: Law was in a legal dispute about the ownership of the festival at the time these claims were made.4 It is also questionable how far his views regarding the exploitation of poorer Burners would be relevant given the spread of Burning Man labour today: as Turner (2008) and Rey (2013) have observed, wealthy, technical workers are subsidizing the festival through their ‘gifted’ expenditure on complex art cars or other creative projects. In any case, complaints regarding exploitation must be considered with a view, also, to Burner motivations and the conviviality characteristic of the volunteer experience. Identifying key motivating factors for attendance, research has found that ‘gifted’ labour was not only essential to the operations of the festival but also constituted an experience treasured by the individual (Chen 2005, 110). Respondents cited the opportunity to work on creative projects, access to immediate feedback and a sense of purpose as key motivations to volunteer (Chen 2005). Some privileged their work at Burning Man to the extent that, when looking for work outside of the festival, they insisted on employment contracts that granted them time off for its duration, while others claimed that if their employers refused to give them the necessary holiday, they would seek alternative employment (Chen 2005). There will always be room for Law’s view that the exploitation of labour at Burning Man masquerades as personal fulfilment, but if we are prepared to disregard festival-goer accounts and what occurs on their level of experience, the matter descends into a futile existential one: is the event a contrived simulacra or ‘real’ version of utopia? It is true that Burning Man intimates – rather than manifests – a truly flat-structured organization, yet what the experience alludes to is arguably more important than the exceptions to its own rule. Burning Man might champion a vision that is impossible to achieve in a worldly sense, but it suggests, rather than realizes, a cohesive society without spectators. It is worth recalling here Reedy’s distinction between the fictional utopia and utopianism: the latter term describes not fixed places but practices that are ‘motivated by longing for a better future’ (Reedy 2002, 171).
The notion of radical self-expression has an important place within the utopian practices of Burning Man. Expressive participation is, then, often portrayed as an emancipating tool; a route to self-actualization:
[By] creating and participating with interactive art installations, theme camps, and inventive costuming, Burning Man participants may performatively express some ‘inner vision’ and thereby engage in a process of ‘self-reflexivity’ that reflects some inner aspect of themselves. (Gilmore 2005, 86)
It is here assumed that expression is crucial to unlocking an otherwise suppressed part of the self, and thus, that carnivalesque-catharsis is located in the ‘becoming’ of individuals. That the festival is a personally transformative context, marked through outward signs of performance and theatricality, is embedded in the Burning Man discourse. This assemblage of beliefs is not new; for it furthers the new age celebration of self-expression by conflating its meaning with the tenets of performance and participation. This particular championing of self-expression privileges flamboyancy, theatricality, individuality, decadence and sexual freedoms. Conversely, inhibition, passivity and conformity are seen as the antithesis of expression; the unfortunate by-products of a commercial world dependent on the cultivation of human weaknesses. Turning these by-products on their head, that carnival has the capacity to act as a performative genre conducive to popularized creativity (Turner 1979, 474) is exemplified, most conspicuously, by the theatricality of the Burning Man audience: the emphasis on the radical individual and the banishment of spectators democratizes the obligation to perform amongst all participants, though what exactly counts as performance is not always clear. Burning Man does not promulgate any defined understanding of performance – only the trope that it is a collective responsibility. A degree of nihilism is bound up in such pure subjectivism (if performance can mean anything to anyone, it can also mean everything, and nothing). Indeed, Clupper (2007) analyses performativity at Burning Man through the performative lens of Erving Goffman, who defined performance as ‘all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some effect on the observers’ (Goffman 1959, 22). Resonating with the theoretical pitfalls of the ‘active audience’, this definition is however too broad and too steeped in the everyday to usefully frame the way in which audiences perform at Burning Man.
Although the culture of Burning Man is known to foster spontaneity and unpredictability in terms of the artistic contribution of participants, they do also perform in a tradition of foreseeable ways, forming an ensemble of action that produces what Clupper has cogently described as ‘theatricality and self-conscious displays’ (Clupper 2007, 98). Some rehearsed and conspicuous features take the form of participant processions and interactive performances of music and theatre. Many could be viewed as ‘presentational’, but many others are either audience-based (as is the case, for example, of the event’s ritualized lamp-lighting procession) or incorporate an interactive element that merges the performance with the audience. Illuminating is Gilmore’s description of an opera composed for the festival by Pepe Ozan (Gilmore 2008, 220–1). Following liaisons with the Burning Man organization prior to its execution, Ozan was required to write in more opportunities for the audience to become immersed in the performance as actors, rather than spectators (Gilmore 2008). It is precisely this kind of physical blend of scripted artists with unscripted audience participation that further enriches the atmosphere and appearance of co-production. Similarly, the wearing of costume and unconventional dress also generates a collectivized theatrical posture, which transforms many encounters into moments of performance. Some participants take on well-thought-out costumes and characters, while others embellish their clothes spontaneously. Subsuming costume under performance, as the festival’s discourse tends to do, one may interpret conspicuous display – Falassi’s hallmark of celebratory culture (1987) – as the most democratized form of participation on site. As shown in Figure 5.4, the practice plays into a surrealism that shapes the visual identity of the wearer: supporting this transformation, it is not uncommon for participants to take on ‘Playa names’ to complete their temporary alter ego, for the duration of the festival (Clupper 2007, 126).
This reinvention of the self through temporary renaming and the wearing of stylized dress represent a simple and accessible way of maintaining the principle of ‘No Spectators’. Very elaborate costumes may not be easily available to all, though there are fancy dress boutiques offering free clothing transformations. Newcomers (struggling, perhaps, with getting to grips with life in the desert) are less acclimatized to the performance ideology, which is sometimes revealed through the absence of costume. It is also true that in the hottest hours of the day costume is often abandoned for the minimal and the comfortable. The event however comes to life as the heat recedes at dusk, and at this time of day many costumes can be observed that are clearly the result of considerable pre-planning.
Dressing up at Burning Man contributes to a scenographic environment of voyeurism and exhibitionism; bodily additions to the stylized event landscape. Not unlike the fantastical characters adopted in virtual spaces of competitive play, it is likely that the satisfaction stemming from the ingenuity of masterminding a persona is a motivating factor, while display is key to the collective enjoyment of being seen (Fron et al. 2007, 2, 14). In the absence of obviously distinguished performers (that comprise the advertised line-up billings at other festivals), costume offers a behavioural genre by which ordinary participants can confer theatrical status on themselves. Burning Man might reject the conventional performance hierarchy typical of the concert-model event, though degrees of visual ostentation and complexity in costumes form a different type of status-system, nonetheless. Costume is variant and balanced by the impracticalities of the desert, which affects some more than others, since those with mobile homes are better able to transport elaborate costumes to the festival, whereas those without their own vehicle will likely prioritize more essentials (like food and water!), over costume. Access to resources can affect, then, the extent to which costume is employed, and as a result, the degree of theatrical participation. For these reasons it is possible to argue, as Gilmore has done, that to some extent Burners inevitably replay society’s class structures (Gilmore 2008, 128). Despite the discernible emphasis on dress-up play in contemporary festival cultures, as detailed in the previous chapter, there is little research focused on explaining this phenomenon: indeed, Fron et al. maintain that dress-up play has been largely ignored by the traditional play theorists, arguing that Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga’s canonical treatise on play culture, is biased towards the analysis of play domains dominated by males – ‘sports, competition, warfare, legal and political structures’ (Fron et al. 2007, 1–2). For males and females, however, the embellishment of identity enabled by costume constitutes a kind of pleasure-giving, Turnerian liminality; as Fron et al. highlight, it is a mode of play that offers ‘potentially transformative and sublime experiences in the context of what might be viewed by outsiders as merely “entertainment”’ (2007). Intuitively, it is clear that costume wearing at music festivals is a form of play, yet some choices in dress (or the choice not to get dressed, as the case may be) are also interpretable in a more nuanced way: as transgressions of gender stereotyping and prohibitive expectations surrounding sexual behaviour. Burning Man regulars include transgendered, bisexual and homosexual attendees, as well as those with body modifications, and various workshops and attractions at the festival also cater to those who practise sexual fetishes. These facets of the celebration are sometimes expressed through dress:
Figure 5.4 ’Siberia’, a Burning Man participant
Source: Ales Prikryl/DustToAshes.com
Burning Man’s carnivalesque masking and costume are political because they give permission to drag queens and kings to cross the solid societal lines of gender, and it gives permission to sexualized participants to wear sex toys on their bodies in public. (Clupper 2007, 90)
Bakhtin’s (1984) concept of carnivalesque inversion coincides with the reversal of social norms represented by gender-transgressive dress, to some degree, because there is a challenge to gender stereotyping and an assertion of sexual liberation. Yet there is an important difference between this and the playful swapping of gender ascriptions described in Bakhtin’s work, which lasted only as long as the topsy-turvy interval of carnival celebration would allow, before normative conditions were fully restored. At Burning Man, this practice is the revealing of real and permanent identifiers, and it is linked to enduring scenes that offer longer-term membership than that which is provided at the event. Thinking more broadly, however, are participants engaging in a liberating act, exercising their ‘radical self-expression’ when they dress up, or are they conforming to a social system that indirectly pressures them to behave in this way? While it is true that the definition of performance is left open to participant interpretation, the culture and parameters of the event make a relatively narrow collection of expressive actions realistically achievable. These form a performance ‘orthopraxis’, a set of behaviours that are enshrined and reified through festival-related websites, forums and literature, in positive affirmation of the civic, participatory ethos. As Clupper has acknowledged, there is a paradoxical use of costume for self-expression and conformity: some want to stand out, whereas others ‘want desperately to look normal amongst the freaks’ (Clupper 2007, 89). Costume is used as a strategy for both ostentation and conformity, and while these might appear to be mutually exclusive, in this context they, in actual fact, happen simultaneously. Whatever the mix of motivations that are at work, in the absence of conspicuously advertised performances on elevated stages, the expressive display of the audience on ground level is accentuated. In the mediated images and videos of the event, beyond the surrealism of the landscape, it is the Burners who are objectified as features of interest that capture the event’s rationale, or, we might say, brand. In many ways, this is what participants come for; to reclaim a piece of performative emphasis, and in doing so, to feel like a star.
Without doubt, it is Burning Man’s advocacy of Burners and their generation of site-wide bacchanalia that achieves the aura of authenticity responsible for its extraordinary, vanguard status. Burning Man is wholly, and somewhat precariously, dependent on a carefully proportioned range of participant contributions. Participants are unable to contribute in the same way, or to the same extent, and because of these varying capacities BRCLLC must cultivate a workable balance of infrastructure builders, volunteers, artists and performers, from the ticket-buying population, with roles well matched to their skills and motivations. For the event to take place each September, it is crucial that it recruits a sufficient number of direct contributors responsible for theme camps, infrastructure and art, though less involved participants must be factored into the mix, for there will always be those less inclined (and less able) to behave in ways that are idealized by the event’s precept of democratized production, that lies at the centre of its identity. Up until recently, the balance of patrons and their varying contributions functioned organically, like a delicate ecosystem. And as is the case with such a system, when one component is imbalanced, it can threaten it in its entirety.
Such a threat emerged in 2011. Until that year, since 1986 the event had not once sold out of tickets – despite its steady, incremental growth. With enough tickets to supply demand, there was always enough tickets to include ‘extreme’ participants, i.e. those that laboured extensively to produce core and tangible features, the art, infrastructure and theme camps, as well as any other types of clientele, without having to create a two-tiered system that distinguished between regular and ‘more involved’ participants. Up until 2011, although the proportion of newcomers rose and fell, they did not absorb the majority of the available festival tickets. When tickets sold out for the first time in 2011, ticket scarcity had a defining impact on the once-organic system of contribution. For a start, many long-time attendees were excluded from the event. According to the Huffington Post, this stunned Burning Man regulars, who took for granted their continued attendance at the event – and became disgruntled that an event which had promulgated radical inclusion so earnestly would be ‘forced to exclude members of its own community’ (Schwartz 2012). For a number of reasons, the scenario threw the survival of Burning Man’s defining precepts into question: in the first instance, could the egalitarian ideals of the event be maintained with unsustainably steep growth in the demand for tickets? Exacerbating issues, the 2011 sellout then inflated demand even further the following year. It would appear that, not surprisingly, on selling out Burning Man became notoriously more exclusive, which accelerated demand further. A review of media reports and forum discussions evidence that those wishing to buy tickets to Burning Man 2012 were wary of scarcity and purchased more tickets than usual, earlier than they would have if the event had not been openly heralded as over-subscribed. Secondly, sensing the steep trajectory of demand in Burning Man tickets, the event became a profitable opportunity for ticket touts (or scalpers, as they are known in the United States), who tried to buy as many tickets as possible and sell them on for much-inflated prices. Touts, panic buying and the influx of newcomers unaccustomed to the guiding principles of the celebration collectively represented a new and difficult challenge to the identity and cultural integrity of Burning Man. For the first time, the organization needed clear, efficient strategies for protecting veteran Burners and ensuring their inclusion – particularly those who were responsible for bringing large-scale projects to the event – while at the same time providing an inclusive space for the uninitiated, without distinguishing them as ‘lesser’ kinds of participants. The issue was worsened when a price-tiered lottery system was introduced to deal with heightened demand in January 2012. Replacing the previous first-come-first-served system for purchasing tickets, hopeful ticket-buyers entered their details and which price-tier ticket they wanted to buy into the new online system, which recorded their details. Not unlike the system used at Glastonbury, which is also over-subscribed, the system introduced the random selection of successful applicants from the pre-registrations – an attempt to achieve, according to the Guardian, a more equitable system than the first-come-first-served procedure that it replaced (McVeigh 2012). Sources do not agree on how many tickets were actually released through the lottery system, but they range from 30,000 to 40,000. This means that between 10,000 and 20,000 tickets were held back from this public sale, and presumably, these were purposely set aside for the essential contributors and infrastructure builders, before the subsequent furore unfolded – meaning that, despite efforts to treat Burners more or less the same, the streamlining of participants according to contribution-level was already taking place. As soon as the lottery system was announced it became a controversial and largely unpopular decision amongst Burners, who feared that it would displace long-time veterans and split up existing creative teams. When the tickets went on sale in 2012, launched in conjunction with a YouTube video, entitled ‘Oh the Places You Will Go’, the positive exposure only seemed to heighten the problem: with demand already snowballing from last year’s sellout, the video clocked up over 800,000 views in three days. The views now stand, at the time of writing, at three million (Saunders 2012). As a memorable video edit to what is often described as the Western world’s more bizarre festival, it is unsurprising the video went viral. Following its release, Burning Man saw the number of registrations for tickets climb to 80,000 – well beyond what could be accommodated on the site. When ticket-holders were randomly selected from the newly introduced online registration system, according to reports ‘many of the people who make up the fabric of the festival, from camp leaders to community organizers to artists and performers, were left stranded’ (Schwartz 2012). The furore was palpable across the Atlantic, as promoters and festival-goers alike mused whether the crisis had sounded a the death-knell for the event, and its precariously executed ‘No Spectators’ praxis. Introduced with good intentions, the registration system had diluted Burning Man regulars with a large influx of newcomers to such an extent that collectives responsible for creating theme camps and infrastructure were not able to purchase tickets. This scenario is rather unique to Burning Man, since conventional festivals would not expect production crews to pay for tickets, they would expect to pay these individuals for their services. However, given the way Burning Man as a somewhat anomalous event is structured, the sudden bar to entry brought with it a significant threat to the preservation of the culture. As a statement from the Burning Man organization read, Burning Man is a participatory and collaborative event, and many collaborations are perilously close to falling apart’ (Schwartz 2012). According to further statements made by Burning Man CEO and spokeswoman Marian Goodell, roughly one-quarter of ‘long-term participants who make Burning Man work did not get tickets’ (McVeigh 2012), while other statements made by Goodell indicated that the majority of people who had previously ‘created the foundations of Burning Man’ were unable to secure a ticket – presenting an even more serious challenge to the festival (Schwartz 2012). The true extent of the problem may never be quantitatively known, yet what is certain is that key individuals were excluded from core, previously established groups that were responsible for much of the entertainments on site. This scenario left gaps in the collectives, inevitably weakening their ability to complete their projects for the event.
It is probable that the 2012 Burning Man event would have sold out regardless of the release of the promotional video, yet it undoubtedly pushed this once-obscure event into the consciousness of a much wider, potential clientele; a clear testimony to the potency of the new media platform. This potency was problematic, however – resulting in the dilution of Burning Man culture across an unsustainable clientele. The impact of the video exemplifies the unpredictability of viral events in today’s fully media-saturated landscape, and the damage that over-promotion can wreak: the video provided a globally accessible window into an unusual but delicately balanced culture, but in doing so, threatened it with destabilization. As spokeswoman Goodell herself acknowledged; ‘when a town grows too quickly, the infrastructure can’t keep up with it’ (Schwartz 2012). The ticketing lottery introduced by Burning Man was an attempt to create a fair system in a new environment of ticket scarcity, but as acknowledged by one Burner participant – ‘the problem with a really fair system is that nobody really wants fair – they want their tickets’ (Yours in the Dust 2012). Online responses to the introduction of the lottery do not give a completely fair representation of audience opinion, yet they do underline the frustration and entitlement felt by some regulars – the ‘veteran’ Burners. These emotions testify to the strength of the emotional connection between the event and its committed participants, some of whom reacted as if they had been displaced from their home. The New York Times, for example, reported a ‘multitude of outraged Twitter messages, Facebook posts, blog entries and comments on online news stories’, as the new outcome of ticket scarcity (Wollan 2012). Disappointed Burners blamed scalpers, or ticketing touts, as grossly overpriced tickets began to appear on secondary ticket-seller websites. Despite accusations that many Burning Man veterans did not receive tickets, while the scalpers did, it is possible that the true influence of scalpers as an exacerbating factor was exaggerated. This party was an easy target for blame, for the ‘ordinary’ ticket-buying public, who are placed at a disadvantage when tickets cannot be purchased at the usual retail price, already reviles them. Yet the true impact of scalpers remains unclear: the editor of the Black Rock Beacon (Burning Man’s in-house paper), Mitchell Martin, estimated up to 15,000 tickets were purchased by ticket touts, while festival spokesperson Goodell denied knowledge of the extent of the problem (McVeigh 2012). However, one way to calculate an estimation of ‘scalped’ tickets is to simply quantify how many tickets secondary ticket-sellers online are advertising. One participant, who did this at the time, could find only 116 tickets being advertised by touts (Destination Burning Man 2014). Furthermore, the overpriced tickets on secondary seller sites (up to £5,000 each) did not seem to be shifting after being advertised – undermining the assumption that scalpers could actually benefit from secondary selling (Schwartz 2012). The extent of scalping may well have been grossly exaggerated following the disappointments caused by the ticketing lottery, though there is no comprehensive way of proving this. However, if the ticketing touts were a less significant factor in displacing veteran Burners, what else could account for the proliferation of demand? It is probable that ticket-buyers requested more tickets than they needed for the purposes of increasing the chances of securing entry for themselves and their friends. The fact that this practice on a large scale significantly distorted Burning Man’s ability to accurately judge true demand seems to be acknowledged by the Burning Man organization, when they claimed that Burners were being ‘creative’ in the registrations process, in order to increase the likelihood of securing tickets (Chase 2012). There was some incredulity, expressed in UK industry circles, that BRCLLC did not anticipate this result. One participant similarly directed his comments as thus: ‘how did you not know that if you had a lottery people would sign up multiple times?’ (Chase 2012). As blogger Tony Vigorito argued, the lottery system misjudged the ticket-buyer’s incentives to cheat, ‘as if, he argues, ‘Burning Man attendees – creative and anarchic by their very nature – would not find ways to subvert the system’ (Vigorito 2014). If we imagine the ticketing lottery as a type of game, it was not designed with its players in mind – players that are both economic actors and actors socialized to protect their own self-interest (Vigorito 2014). It is human nature to ‘play’ the system to achieve desired results, which in this case was securing that golden ticket and being included in the celebrations at Burning Man. The people cheating the system were not all Burner regulars, and an acutely perceived threat to the culture was the influx of newcomers to the event over 2011 and 2012. Evidence suggests this was a more powerful force than scalpers. As observed of the viral video release:
What nobody could have foreseen was that a video about Burning Man would go viral when it did, and get plastered on the home pages of so many different sites around the world. Hooray for new blood (we were all new once), but that has its challenges. (Yours in the Dust 2012)
With the release of the video, the secret was out. Because the event’s production relies so wholly on contributions from acclimatized ticket-buyers, this surge naturally brought with it a re-evaluation of Burning Man’s values and strategies for development. The Guardian in Britain claimed that Burning Man ‘could be engulfed by its own success’ (McVeigh 2012), while the Huffington Post warned that the ‘Burning Man culture has spread faster than the event organizers can handle’ (Schwartz 2012). Discussing the lottery system and the exclusion of veteran Burners, spokeswoman Marian Goodell herself claimed that it was ‘the end’ of Burning Man if they failed to come up with a solution (Wollan 2012). These issues were partially resolved, in part by selling tickets directly to theme camp organizers and artists. Yet the complaints that had begun to simmer within the Burning Man community revealed a politics of participation, grounded in the notion that access to the festival should rely on levels of dedication, and a kind of patriotic understanding, which varied from Burner to Burner. Within these discourses of belonging was a palpable theme that placed a privileged group, ‘veteran Burners’, at the core of Burning Man’s charm and strengths as a festival. One festival-goer, Mick Jeffries, who runs the Kentucky Fried Camp, claimed ‘the people who did not get tickets are the people who make Burning Man captivating’ (Wollan 2012), while the Guardian warned that with veteran Burners left ticketless, ‘the ethos that made Burning Man so special is under threat’ (McVeigh 2012). There appears to be several points of consensus, in that the influx of newcomers could not by any means contribute to the same extent as veteran Burners, and the idea that the very identity of Burning Man is bound to specific groups of participants. These assumptions underlie the mildly disparaging analysis of newcomers discernible in the discourse. In response to Burning Man’s decision to safeguard 10,000 tickets for theme camp members, one veteran Burner speaking to the Guardian stated ‘it means that more than a quarter of attendees will have been hand-picked by the [Burning Man organization]. But it sure beats having 20,000 newbies standing around looking at each other and wondering WTF they should do for a week’ (McVeigh 2012). In the same article, another source feared that ‘a gathering full of newcomers would turn [Burning Man] into spring break at Daytona Beach’. The comments reveal a common thread: that newcomers, ignorant of the core values of Burning Man, will not know how to behave in the ‘appropriate’ way. Another long-time Burner, Josh Reiss, who also runs the Los Angeles Burning Man Forum, stated that ‘too many newcomers could alter the event’, and that ‘if Burning Man attracts a crowd like Coachella … it would put a strain on the environment’ (McVeigh 2012). Discernible here is a system of social distinction that places Burning Man above and beyond other celebrations, like Daytona Beach and Coachella; the idea that there is a type of cultural purity that the Burn must protect, if it is to survive. In many ways, these discourses echo the relationship between immigration and nationalism: when too much of the former is perceived, the prospect of a threatened culture instigates a patriotic backlash from those wishing to protect it from change. An additional threat that can be drawn out from the discourses is gentrification. The wealthy, as well as newcomers, have been blamed for transforming the festival, for dampening its countercultural ethos. As one Burner put it, ‘the people who make Burning Man awesome are not the millionaires who sit in their RVs all day … it’s the people who scrape to make their camps awesome’ (Schwartz 2012), while another asked, ‘did anyone see the luxo camps of high end motorhomes in circles to keep out the riff raff? That might be the whole place in a few years’ (Huffington Post 2012). Somewhat paradoxically, while there is a desire for exclusivity from uninitiated newcomers, there is a fear that too much exclusivity, if empowered by price, might displace the less wealthy and gentrify the event. Inherent in these politics is the othering of the uninitiated, who are placed as threats to the culture. With ticket availability under threat, festival regulars began to privilege themselves as the people that contribute the most, an argument that helps them to justify their call for guaranteed entry. Underpinning this rationale is the notion that individuals should ‘get out’ what they ‘put in’; paralleling the logic of trade, commercial exchange and the economics of employment, long-term contribution to Burning Man begins to constitute a form of capital, allowing them to re-purchase entry as a privileged members of the community. There is, perhaps, a possessiveness here that reinforces all of the neo-tribal interpretations of Burning Man. For these individuals, the Burning Man experience cannot be replaced by another holiday or festival, and the prospect of exclusion from their community is a source of genuine agitation. The solutions to the problem of scarcity involved initiatives that have forced Burners and the organization to question their leading doctrines. After stating that the search was on for a ‘structural, holistic answer’ to ticket scarcity and allocation (Wollan 2012) the 10,000 remaining tickets were released to theme camps and infrastructure groups. Ultimately, this means that extreme participants – those bringing substantial projects to the event – were given greater access to the festival over others. Applicants for the tickets were judged against several criteria, which included whether or not they had attended Burning Man in the past, as previous attendance counted in favour of obtaining a ticket. Clearly, this move was to protect the participation of the veteran Burners, or at the very least the already initiated. The aim of this strategy, according to the Burning Man organization, was to ‘carefully and conscientiously reconstruct the rich tapestry of our community’ (McVeigh 2012). However there is also an economic factor in judging successful applicants, it is likely that those who can afford to cover the costs of donating and bringing infrastructure to the event will be prioritized over the individuals who cannot. This selectivity did allow Burning Man to return to selling tickets on a first-come-first-served basis in 2013, for those who had pre-registered. As is standard for a popular event, it still sold out that year and the next – prompting some to question, ‘how do you promote radical inclusion at an event that simply won’t be able to include everyone?’ (Schwartz 2012). With the key contributors protected with reserved tickets, the issue was neatly reconciled by spokesperson Marian Goodell: ‘radical inclusion is about how we welcome a stranger into our culture, not about how many people we can fit into the clown car’ (Schwartz 2012).
1 Concept staging is a phrase introduced by the author to refer to performance spaces with a highly stylized sculptural form. The earliest notable example is the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury, which was built out of scaffolding and metal sheeting in 1971. As specialized production teams are developing their techniques, concept stages are now emerging as distinct features of smaller UK festivals. For example, Lancashire’s Beatherder hosts a stage resembling a fortress, while BoomTown has introduced one stage built to represent a gold mine, and another, a Mayan temple. Skills developed in the set design of film and theatre productions are often utilized in the build of concept stages, which add to the repertoire of scenery animating the thematic, festival space.
2 Positions that require technical skills or involve participant safety are typically paid. Crews that operate heavy equipment and electrical equipment are paid. Construction managers are also required to have OSHA (health and safety) training.
3 On 3 March 2014, Burning Man announced the completion of a three-year transition from a profit-making Limited Liability Company (LLC) known as Black Rock City LLC, into a non-profit organization ‘The Burning Man Project’. However the announcement on the Burning Man blog was met with mixed reaction, partly due to BRCLLC’s continued ‘private ownership of Burning Man’s intellectual property’ (Burningman.org 2014).
4 This was a 2007 lawsuit relating to the festival’s ownership, involving its founders John Law, Larry Harvey and Michael Mikel. The case was settled out of court on undisclosed terms, in 2008.
