Engendering Community Through Performance and Play at the Euphoria and Scorched Nuts Regional Burns Bryan Schmidt

Home , AfrikaBurn, Alchemy (event), Burning Man, Kiwiburn, Larry Harvey, Object manipulation

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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2012 "Welcome Home!": Engendering Community Through Performance and Play at the Euphoria and Scorched Nuts Regional Burns Bryan Schmidt

Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF VISUAL ARTS, THEATER & DANCE

―WELCOME HOME!‖: ENGENDERING COMMUNITY THROUGH PERFORMANCE AND

PLAY AT THE EUPHORIA AND SCORCHED NUTS REGIONAL BURNS

BRYAN SCHMIDT

A Thesis submitted to the School of Theater in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2012 Bryan Schmidt defended this thesis on April 25, 2012.

The members of the supervisory committee were:

Elizabeth Osborne Professor Directing Thesis

Mary Karen Dahl Committee Member

Krzystof Salata Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

For my parents Susan and William, and my brother Kevin.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special Thanks to Beth Osborne for her tireless, crucial help and encouragement throughout the writing process, and for introducing me to the world of Burning Man; Mary Karen Dahl, for her insightful guidance especially during the planning stages of the project; Kris Salata, for serving on my committee, pointing me to fascinating theory, and engaging in lengthy discussions that helped me form my argument; Aaron C. Thomas, and George McConnell for each providing invaluable help during some of this project‘s most consternating moments; Natalya Baldyga for pointing me towards several texts that formed critical components of my research; Rebecca Ormiston, Susan Schmidt, and William Schmidt for help and support.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures ...... vii Abstract ...... viii INTRODUCTION ...... 1 Background ...... 1 Review of Literature ...... 7 Methodology ...... 13 Chapter Outline ...... 14 Beyond the Party ...... 16

CHAPTER ONE: LIVED IN FESTIVALS AND THE FORMATION OF PLAY COMMUNITIES ...... 18 Defining a Lived-in Festival ...... 18 ―Emancipation‖ at a Lived-in Festival ...... 24 Communitas in the Festival Setting ...... 28 Conclusions: Political Possibilities ...... 32

CHAPTER TWO: INDUCTING THE POPULACE: OFFICIAL ACTIVITIES AT SCORCHED NUTS AND EUPHORIA ...... 35 Introduction ...... 35 Rules and Enforcement ...... 37 Entry Procedures ...... 40 The Effigy ...... 45 Fire in the Sky: The Conclave and Effigy Burning ...... 48 Conclusions ...... 51

CHAPTER THREE: FROM PEAK EXPERIENCE TO COMMUNITY EMERGENCE: UNOFFICIAL ACTIVITIES AT SCORCHED NUTS ...... 53 Introduction ...... 53 Fire and Flow: Object Manipulation in Performance and Play ...... 55 The Storm at Scorched Nuts: Weather and Community ...... 63 Community through Playful Exploration ...... 67

Conclusions ...... 69

CONCLUSIONS...... 72 A Brief Note on Methodology ...... 72 Size Matters: Finding Community in the Very Small ...... 74

APPENDIX A: ―THE TEN PRINCIPLES OF BURNING MAN‖...... 76 APPENDIX B: ―EUPHORIA‘S LIST OF TEN PRINCIPLES‖ ...... 77 APPENDIX C: ―IRB LETTER OF APPROVAL‖ ...... 78 APPENDIX D: ―CONSENT FORM‖ ...... 80 APPENDIX E: ―PREHEAT/AFTERBURN QUESTIONNAIRE‖...... 82 APPENDIX F: ―SCORCHED NUTS QUESTIONNAIRE‖ ...... 83 APPENDIX G: ―EUPHORIA QUESTIONNAIRE‖ ...... 84 APPENDIX H: ―SUMMER CAMP MUSIC FESTIVAL QUESTIONNAIRE‖ ...... 85 APPENDIX I: ―PHOTO RELEASE FORM 1‖...... 86 APPENDIX J: ―PHOTO RELEASE FORM 2‖ ...... 87

REFERENCES ...... 88 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 93

LIST OF FIGURES

1.1 The Burning Man Icon ...... 20

2.1 Euphoria‘s Effigy ...... 47

3.1 A Participant in the Middle of a Fire Spinning Routine at Scorched Nuts ...... 56

3.2 An Intensely Focused Fire Spinner at Euphoria ...... 59

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ABSTRACT

This thesis explores two regional offshoots of the annual Burning Man Festival in Nevada (Burns)—Ohio‘s Scorched Nuts and Georgia‘s Euphoria—by examining how, through performance and play activities in these temporary festival settings, participants may form with one another deep, communal relationships evocative of Victor Turner‘s concept of communitas. Combining theoretical reading, field research, and participant interviews, it discusses the political potential of these relationships as well as the way that participant theatricality and festival dramaturgies contribute to their construction. The thesis begins by considering general effects that attending a festival in which people must remain inside the premises over a series of days (a ―lived-in‖ festival) might have on participants‘ ability to engage with others in intimate, intersubjective encounters. It then outlines the ―official activities‖ of Euphoria and Scorched Nuts—those activities orchestrated by event organizers and which involve all or essentially all who enter the grounds—and shows how these activities create distinct overarching dramaturgies for each festival that establish commonalities between participants and energize them to socialize with one another. Finally, it examines case studies of Scorched Nuts‘ unofficial activities—those orchestrated by participants, rather than organizers, and generally involving only a few people at a time—proposing that these activities are the primary sites where communitas arises in a festival setting.

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INTRODUCTION

Background On the last evening I spent at Euphoria, a festival held in June of 2011 on a wooded tract of land called Cherokee Farms, I awoke in the middle of the night to flashes of multi-colored neon lights and bursts of orange flames outside my tent. Hearing sporadic cheers, almost inaudible over the plangent thumping of heavy dubstep music coming from the theme camp1 next to me, I went outside and found a vivacious group of about ten people gathered in a circle around a young man spinning flaming poi.2 He swung the flaming orbs around in dynamic movements that synchronized with the music, his improvised routine appearing almost choreographed; this virtuosity elicited occasional whoops and whistles from some spectators, but most just stood rapt in the light of the glowing spheres streaking through the night air. Eventually, the spinner‘s flames began to expire. After winding down his routine, he used what little fire was left to ignite the ends of another spinner‘s apparatus—a staff this time—and then took his place amongst the spectators as the new performer repeated the process. This had been going on for hours; a crowd once of dozens had now dwindled to a fervent few. Those who remained exchanged little dialogue but seemed intimately familiar with one another despite most having been complete strangers only days before. They had somehow been bound together through their playful activity in this dreamlike environment. The next day they would leave and likely not meet again for a year or more, but for the duration of the evening, they were a miniature community—temporary family. Euphoria is one of dozens of regional festivals throughout the United States known as Burns, two of which—Euphoria and Scorched Nuts—serve as the primary subjects of this thesis. This story illustrates both the dazzling nature of these festival environments and the deep interpersonal connections that participants can form within them, areas of inquiry that are the foci of my research. Scorched Nuts is a four-day event in its fifth year of existence. It took place

1 Theme camps are campsites with a unified decoration scheme or which provide some sort of free good or service to the festival community. This particular theme camp was called Area 51. Its denizens played dubstep music for 24 hours a day at the volume of a night club and decorated the space around their campsite with neon streamers and LEDs to simulate a rave atmosphere. 2 Poi are tethered weights that users swing about their bodies in rhythmical and geometric patterns, sometimes while lit afire, (see Figure 3.1). While the practice originated with the Maori people of New Zealand, certain US subcultures have adopted it as a form of recreational object manipulation performance. ―Homepage,‖ accessed October 23, 2011, http://www.homeofpoi.com. 1 in Rutland, Ohio at the beginning of June, 2011, with 117 participants.3 Euphoria, a three-day event in its first year of existence, took place in LaFayette, Georgia one week after Scorched Nuts, with approximately 650 participants.4 Like all official regional Burns, Euphoria and Scorched Nuts are subsidiaries of the massive arts and counter-cultural festival Burning Man, which takes place annually in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. Regional Burns are much smaller entities populated by anywhere from several dozen to a few thousand people (much smaller than the 50,000+ attendance of their progenitor, which participants sometimes call Black Rock City or the Big Burn). They are multi-day, lived-in5 festivals held in nonurban locales, characterized by art, communal living, environmentalism, drug culture, nudity, and fire. Regional Burns first arose in 1997, eleven years after the first Burning Man, and have evolved into a full-blown, nationwide movement. These local events are the primary ways that many around the country experience this alternative subculture.6 Each Burn has a unique size, geographic location, duration, calendar date, and economy (both in terms of festival organization expenditures and participants‘ financial means), but they are united by the premise that festivalgoers themselves, rather than organizers, provide nearly every aspect of the event‘s entertainment. Participants are expected to bring what they personally need to survive for the length of the festival, but also encouraged to take along elements for amusement or sustenance that might benefit others.7 Some people bring surplus necessities like toilet paper or bottled water to share with other campers, while others bring musical instruments, decorations, costumes, and paintings, or build elaborate art installations and theme camps to add color to the festival environment. A list of ten principles developed by Burning Man founder Larry Harvey governs Burns‘ organization and the actions of participants while they attend. Briefly, these principles are: Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-Reliance, Radical Self-Expression,

3 ―2011 recap and financials,‖ Scorched Nuts Official Website, accessed April 15, 2012, http://www.scorchednuts.com/financials/. 4 No exact attendance figures are available for the 2011 Euphoria Burn. Euphoria is the ―sister Burn‖ of Alchemy, Georgia‘s major Burning Man regional event, which began in 2007 and takes place in the same location. Alchemy sold out this year with 2,000 attendees. 5 This term is my own and describes multi-day events at which participants stay inside the event space for the duration. I will soon bring some clarity to its implications. 6 ―Burning Man Timeline,‖ accessed September 20, 2011, http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/about_burningman/bm_timeline.html. 7 Most Burns (including Scorched Nuts and Euphoria) either provide infrastructure (power generators, e.g.) or artist grants to aid participants in the development of larger-scale projects for the Burn. Burning Man, for instance, budgets $500,000 annually for art grants, according to its website in 2011. Scorched Nuts lists on its website that it funds three projects annually, with typical grants around $150. 2

Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leaving No Trace, Participation, and Immediacy.8 Burns also all feature an event on their final evening in which the festival population gathers together to take part in a quasi-ceremonial immolation of an effigy.9 A wild party that rages long into the night generally follows, and the next morning, participants exit the festival grounds and head back to their daily lives. While Burning Man has received a good deal of academic coverage in the last decade, no scholars have yet written on regional Burns. This is surprising considering the popularity of Burning Man culture as a subject in artistic, academic, and counter-cultural circles, the fifteen- year existence of regional Burns, and the movement‘s sheer size and breadth throughout the United States.10 In 2011, tickets for the Big Burn sold out for the first time, prompting many in its blogosphere and chat forums to level charges of hypocrisy, saying that the event‘s tenets of decommodification and radical inclusion were becoming increasingly at odds with its reality of high ticket costs and exclusivity. Many perceive Burning Man as having changed from an anarchic gathering of struggling artists to a structured, for-profit attraction that caters to a moneyed clientele.11 Although regional Burns can be exclusive as well—the limited amount of tickets available for the events often sell out in minutes—their comparatively inexpensive prices and geographical proximity to constituencies make them viable to those without the financial means to venture to the Nevada desert.12 They thus hold exciting potential for counter-cultural activity as Burning Man becomes increasingly subsumed into the dominant sphere of US market

8 The precise meanings of each principle may not be immediately clear, but I will elaborate upon them as necessary when a more detailed understanding becomes crucial to my discussion of regional Burn dramaturgies in chapter two. In the meantime, Appendix A provides the entire listing and explanation of each principle from the Burning Man official Website. ―The Burning Man Network—Ten Principles,‖ accessed September 20, 2011, http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/about_burningman/principles.html. 9 Although generally all Burns refer to the object set afire as an ―effigy‖ the term is somewhat misleading. While Burning Man‘s iconic effigy bears a strong resemblance to a human, regional Burns (including those I studied) often burn non-humanoid sculptures or large structures. 10 According to the Burning Man website, no less than thirty Regional Burns exist throughout the United States in addition to international events like Kiwiburn in New Zealand, AfrikaBurn in South Africa, and Nowhere in Spain. From my brief survey of the official figures put out by these events, I would estimate that between 20,000-40,000 people attend Burns annually across the United States. ―2010 Official Regional Event List,‖ accessed October 23, 2011, http://regionals.burningman.com/regionalevents_10.html. 11 For instance, for many years ostensibly no monetary exchange occurred at Burning Man—a symbolic gesture eschewing the capitalist paradigm. Today, participants can spend money on two items: ice and coffee. The ability to purchase these items (especially coffee, with its significance as a dominant drink of the US middle class) suggests the festival‘s attempt to broaden its appeal to those with means who may not want to partake in the event without certain luxuries present. 12 This year, the highest priced Burning Man tickets were $300 for the seven-day festival. Compare this with $40 for Scorched Nuts (four days) and $30 for Euphoria (three days). 3 culture. As a result of these shifting dynamics, many in Burning Man‘s extremely active online chat forums have proposed a reconsideration of the national festival‘s role as the center of Burning Man culture. Blogger Caveat Magister posted his summation of this discourse on the official Burning Man blog, stating: ―By far the most trenchant idea proposed was this: the future of Burning Man belongs to the [R]egionals.‖13 If this idea proves prescient, as I suspect it might, we must see studying regional Burns as a necessary step to understanding both the evolution of Burning Man and the shifting dynamics of the US counter-culture. I suggest that there are several reasons for the omission of regional Burns from the academic conversation. First, their relatively small populations and genealogical link to Burning Man may lead many to assume that they are simply feeble attempts at recreating the spectacle of their namesake—a proverbial poor man‘s Burning Man. Burns also lack the significant media output of their forerunner—written records of most are limited to chat forums, event web pages, and sporadic participant blogs, while Burning Man features a vast array of televisual media, thorough physical and electronic archives, and a sea of associated websites. As a result, Burns currently fly below the radar of a general public, as did Burning Man before its population swelled into the tens of thousands in the mid-1990s. Second, omitting regional Burns from the analysis of Burning Man fits into a pervasive narrative throughout theatre and performance history that prioritizes centralized or large-scale events—those with cultural currency on a national or global level—over smaller, community-centered activities. This trend tends to reify existing structural paradigms in a capitalist system by glorifying entities that succeed financially or achieve public fame. Reorienting our focus away from the large and towards the small, then, perhaps offers an important counter-discourse to the dominant structural paradigm of performance research. Third, as one regional Burn organizer noted in an e-mail conversation with me, without the significant cultural capital of Burning Man, Burns have the reputation of being ―just a party,‖ devoid of any meaning deeper than a bunch of people drinking, taking drugs, getting naked, and letting off steam.14 Thus, there exists the troubling possibility that those who are aware of regional Burns dismiss them as culturally insignificant. As my research shows, regional Burns are much more than mindless bacchanals or miniaturized facsimiles of the Big Burn. They are cultural activities in their own right that

13 Caveat Magister, ―Can the regionals pick up the ticket sale slack—and transform Burning Man?‖, Burning Blog, accessed September 20, 2011, http://blog.burningman.com/2011/07/uncategorized/our_regional_future/. 14 Storm, e-mail message to author, September 16, 2011. 4 encourage an inimitable style of human interconnectedness based on each locality‘s unique landscape and flavor. Says Burning Man performance scholar Wendy Clupper of many regional Burn participants she has met: They didn‘t care about 50,000 people. They didn‘t want to get to the ―big show.‖ They liked their event small. They wanted to get to know people who were like them, who embraced these same philosophies in their area, and that‘s who they wanted to connect with. That‘s the experience they wanted to have. Three hundred people in a farm field, in tents, burning things up, taking food together, living in a community for three days; that‘s what they wanted. They didn‘t want to go out to Burning Man.15 Clupper, here, points not to a hedonistic intent among regional burners, but a social one, with emphasis on the desire to build connections between participants on a local level. Likewise, Torqken, a Burn participant I interviewed, asserted that the regional events offer a better opportunity than Burning Man to form intimate relationships with others who share the environment: ―[The Regionals] have the charm of knowing the people from year to year. Burning Man is just too big to know people [and] remember them. So [at the Regionals] it‘s like family.‖16 Indeed, as I attempt to argue throughout this thesis, smaller, local activities provide a greater opportunity than large-scale, public events to connect with others on a deep, intersubjective level, and this potential forms an integral part of their appeal. My thesis explores community formation through play and performance activities at Scorched Nuts and Euphoria as a way to bring regional Burns into the ongoing academic conversation concerning festival studies, theatrical events, and community in performance. Through this analysis, I hope to also provide insight into the significance of lived-in festivals in general by describing how living, playing, and performing in such environments can lead to a temporary connection—sometimes a deep, communal connection—with those who share the same space. I see in this temporary intersubjective experience political possibility. By examining

15 Wendy Clupper, interview by Bryan Schmidt, phone interview, November 2, 2011. Emphasis hers. Wendy Clupper has since changed her name to Wendy Clupper Maier. Since her major published work appears under her former name, for clarity‘s sake, in this thesis I will continue to refer to her as Wendy Clupper. 16 Torqken, interview by Bryan Schmidt, taped interview, November 12, 2011. 5 festival activities we might better understand the impulse of communality as a tool for enacting social change, and gauge the dramaturgies of movements that utilize it.17 Thus far, I have used three terms, ―festival,‖ ―lived-in festival,‖ and ―community,‖ which, despite their familiarity, are broad terms that require definition: The Oxford English Dictionary defines a festival as ―a time of festive celebration, a festal day,‖ or ―a musical performance or series of performances at recurring periods.‖18 Both definitions express festival as temporally bound, as an event. Yet, there are also permanent institutions, especially in the performing arts, that refer to themselves as festivals (e.g. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival or George Bernard Shaw Festival). Here, the usage refers to ethos, rather than event. We see festival expressed as ethos in the Latin precedent, festivus, defined as ―of a holiday, festive, merry, good-humored.‖19 Permanent institutions that invoke this term imply a celebratory experience for those who attend. Both of these uses apply to Burns, and so I incorporate both into my definition. For the purposes of this thesis, which looks particularly at secular, contemporary events in the United States, I define a festival as a leisurely gathering, marked by its organizers as ―joyous,‖ that is somehow distinguished from everyday life.20 I define a lived-in festival, simply, as a festival in which participants stay inside the event environment for an extended period of time—more than a single night.21 Why should a lived-in festival pique one‘s interest any more than a non-lived-in festival? I argue that the length of time a person spends in the festival environment significantly affects her or his ability to commune with others, undergo a transformative process, and learn to navigate new, complex realms of social relations that may arise in a liminoid setting. By remaining in the festival environment over a period of days, participants become accustomed and attached to the temporary community and social systems created there in a much deeper way than if the festival took place over only a

17 The Occupy Wall Street protests in the fall of 2011 would be one example. In these protests, thousands participated in small ―live-ins‖ that seemingly created deep interpersonal connections between the protestors while also generating grass-roots political energy in individual communities. 18 Oxford English Dictionary Online, accessed September 15, 2011, http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/view/Entry/69567?redirectedFrom=festival#eid. 19 ―Latin Dictionary and Grammar Aid,‖ Kevin Cawley, University of Notre Dame Archives, Accessed September 15, 2011, http://www.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/lookup.pl?stem=festivus&ending=. 20 I should note the similarity of this definition to scholar Johan Huizinga‘s description of ―play,‖ which he sees as having three main characteristics: first, it is an act of freedom, a voluntary act; second, it is not ―ordinary‖ or ―real‖ life; and third, it is secluded or limited—that is, ―it is ‗played out‘ within certain limits of time and place.‖ Thus, we might think of festivals as sorts of enacted play-communities. I will return to Huizinga‘s ideas about play in chapter one. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1950), 4. 21 A more colloquial term for this is a ―camping festival.‖ 6 few hours. Experiencing the cycle of activity, rest, and recuperation over multiple days allows participants to embody the associated gestures of new social, economic, and aesthetic systems arising at the festival on a material, corporeal level. I will further break down my definition of a lived-in festival and discuss its implications on the subject of community emergence in chapter one, which concerns establishing a theoretical framework for lived-in festivals as sites for community creation. Like ―festival,‖ the word ―community‖ has many meanings—the Oxford English Dictionary shows no less than thirteen definitions for the term.22 These generally fall into three categories: 1) Community as place, a grouping of people bound together through geographical proximity. 2) Community as relationship, a way of feeling connected to someone who may or may not be spatially adjoined. Benedict Anderson might call this an imagined community, denoting a perceived binding between people based on similarities in culture, such as language, custom, and moral values.23 3) Community as modality, a manner of congenially behaving with and among those that share a certain space. When I use the term ―community,‖ I am talking in particular about a combination of the latter two definitions, specifically, a deep-felt connection between individuals and the behaviors resulting thereof that evoke Victor Turner‘s notion of spontaneous communitas. Turner defines spontaneous communitas, briefly, as an ephemeral feeling of communal unity and egalitarianism that often comes about in liminal and liminoid settings.24 He writes: ―This relationship is always a ‗happening,‘ something that arises in instant mutuality, when each person fully experiences the being of the other.‖25 Turner saw this temporary connection as constituting a break from the structured and hierarchical relationships that characterize normative society. I see lived-in festivals as sites that hold particularly strong potential for spontaneous communitas to arise, and I am interested in better understanding how and why aesthetic experiences in this setting might facilitate such experiences. Review of Literature As mentioned earlier, Burning Man has proven to be a popular subject in many different fields of academic study including performance (Wendy Clupper, Rachel Bowditch),

22 Oxford English Dictionary Online, accessed October 31, 2011, http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/view/Entry/37337?redirectedFrom=community#eid. 23 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, (London: Verso, 1983). 24 Turner, The Ritual Process, (Chicago: The Aldine Publishing Company, 1969), 126. 25 This is similar, as Turner points out, to the ―I and You‖ relationship proposed by Martin Buber in his seminal text I and Thou. Ibid., 136. 7 ethnography (Jeremy Hockett), sociology (Catherine Chen), ritual and spirituality (Rachel Bowditch, Lee Gilmore), consumer and market studies (Robert V. Kozinets and John F. Sherry), and counter-cultural studies (Brian Doherty).26 Of these perspectives, several have been fundamental to my work on festival and community. Lee Gilmore‘s essay was an important starting point for my thinking about the festival as a site for transformation. She views Burning Man as an almost religious experience—what she calls ―ritual without dogma‖—in a liminal setting that encourages introspection, spirituality, and togetherness.27 Robert V. Kozinets, in contrast, sees burners as consumers, rather than spiritualists, and interprets their journey to Burning Man as a temporary eschewal of the everyday marketplace to experiment in a more community-focused system of economic relations. While he acknowledges that Burning Man‘s discourse promoting decommodification may seem at odds with Black Rock City‘s heavy dependence on the outside market infrastructure to function, he also shows that participants do indeed find innovative ways to re-approach their relationship with the processes of exchange while there, with gift giving and artistic self-expression serving as crucial components to the festival economy.28 A significant part of my project involves bridging these two perspectives. How might we understand the transformative effects of Burns while simultaneously acknowledging the political implications of their participants partaking in alternative economic and social systems? Wendy Clupper‘s dissertation ―The Performance Culture of Burning Man,‖ which lays out a theoretical framework describing identity-making and performance of self at Burning Man, has been vital to my investigation of this question. Utilizing Mikhail Bakhtin‘s concept of carnival and Michel Foucault‘s notion of the heterotopia, Clupper sees Burning Man as a space for liminoidal transformation wherein participants learn to construct social identity through

26 Robert V. Kozinets, ―Can consumers escape the market? Emancipatory illuminations from Burning Man,‖ Journal of Consumer Research 29 (June 2002), 20-38; Lee Gilmore and Mark van Proyen, eds. Afterburn: Reflections on Burning Man (Albequerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005). This collection of scholarly essays on Burning Man featured a wealth of perspectives from a variety of academic fields. Most helpful for my purposes were articles from Lee Gilmore (―Fires in the Heart: Ritual, Pilgrimage, and Transformation at Burning Man‖) and Jeremy Hockett (―Participant Observation and the Study of Self: Burning Man as Ethnographic Experience‖); Katherine Chen, ―Burning Man lights a fire: The Nevada desert doesn‘t just produce art, it produces citizens,‖ In the Fray, December 22, 2003, accessed September 30, 2011, http://inthefray.org/content/view/123/229/; Brian Doherty, This is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2004). 27 Lee Gilmore, ―Fires of the Heart: Ritual, Pilgrimage, and Transformation at Burning Man,‖ in Afterburn, 43-64. 28 Robert V. Kozinets, ―Can consumers escape the market?‖, 29, 34. 8 performativity.29 I similarly look to the theories of Foucault and Bakhtin to understand how organizers construct the atmosphere and ostensible political dramaturgy of festival spaces. I utilize a number of play theorists to inform my work and thinking, especially Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois, and Brian Sutton-Smith. Huizinga provides a framework for viewing play as one of the most (if not the most) fundamental human activities.30 I use his work in chapter one, where I consider the lived-in festival as a temporary play-community. Caillois provides a detailed taxonomy of play—differentiating between major game types as well as their level of structure—which proves helpful in deconstructing playful activities done in the Burn environment (spinning poi, e.g.).31 Sutton-Smith examines play from a psychological perspective, looking in particular at its importance in terms of the learning process. I find his work helpful in my thinking about the generation of communal ties through performance and play.32 Sutton-Smith was also influential to Victor Turner‘s research on liminality, particularly as it relates to liminoid (rather than liminal) genres. Turner‘s thinking has been deeply influential to my work, particularly his writing on structure and anti-structure, and his concept of communitas. As I will describe more fully in chapter one, although Burns espouse a counter- cultural dramaturgy, they are not, as one might think, inherently anti-structural in Turner‘s terms. For Turner, anti-structure comes about through the experiencing of spontaneous communitas and lasts only a brief time before hardening into a more normative series of social relations. Therefore, it should be clear that I am not arguing for the festival itself as an anti-structural zone vis-à-vis normative society, but as a conduit for anti-structural relations to arise.33 I will return to Turner‘s work frequently throughout this thesis. I have also been aided in large part by thinkers from the fields of psychology and anthropology. Psychologist Mihaly Csikzsentmihalyi‘s concept of flow and peak experiences figures prominently in my third chapter, particularly in my discussion of fire-spinning as a playful, theatrical activity capable of generating communitas.34 Anthropologist Clifford Geertz‘s Interpretation of Cultures serves as a foundational text to my ethnographic analysis. I look in

29 Wendy Clupper, ―The Performance Culture of Burning Man,‖ (PhD Diss., University of Maryland, 2008). 30 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 4. 31 Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games (New York: Schocken Books, 1973). 32 Brian Sutton-Smith. Play and Learning (New York: Gardner Press, 1979). 33 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process.; Victor Turner, From Ritual to Play: The Human Seriousness (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982). 34 Mihaly Csikzsentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), 53. 9 particular at his idea of thick interpretation—writing that not only examines subjects‘ actions, but searches for the deeper significance of those actions to the subjects—as a way of understanding the cultural significance of burners‘ activities in the festival.35 Geertz‘s work also influenced my self-reflexive examination of my role as a participant-observer. Although I work in a decidedly interdisciplinary fashion, I ultimately view Burns, Burning Man, and lived-in festivals as sites of performance and theatre. As anthropologist John MacAloon puts it: ―[Festivals] are, in fact ‗megagenres‘ or ‗metagenres‘ of cultural performance. [They do not specify] directly what sort of action the participants will engage in or see. Instead, each erects an additional frame around the other, more discrete performative genres.‖36 Wendy Clupper has similarly theorized Burning Man as a ―heightened theatrical zone.‖ By this, she means that not only is the festival space saturated with overtly theatrical activities, but also that upon entering the grounds, behaviors, play, and personal aesthetics elevate to a level of theatricality: The heightened theatrical zone at Burning Man is one whose borders are at once physical (within the event space) and perceived (the imagined space for play) by participants. Its dynamics are apparent in the behaviors of participants and their personal aesthetics, as well as those around them. At Burning Man the theatrical experience is based on role playing, self-performing and collective collaboration.37 Attending Burning Man or a regional Burn, then, is akin to attending a theatrical performance where the activities of the festivalgoers are the performance texts, so to speak.38 This echoes the work of performance scholar Willmar Sauter, who remarks: [When at a festival, playing culture] receives more attention than usual: the playing is directly focused upon through the concentration of activities. [. . .] A festival can create an atmosphere of playing culture which invites and stimulates

35 Clifford Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, Inc. 1973), 10. Thick description is, I think, most clearly illuminated in his the chapter ―Notes on a Balinese Cockfight.‖ 36 John MacAloon, ―Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle in Modern Societies‖ in Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle, edited by John MacAloon (Philadelphia: The Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984), 250. 37 Wendy Clupper, ―The Performance Culture of Burning Man,‖ 170. 38 Clifford Geertz describes most human behavior as ―symbolic action—action which, like phonation in speech, pigment in painting, line in writing or sonance in music, signifies.‖ Therefore, we might read actions, even those that are not in the traditional realm of performance, as texts. This is particularly true when such behavior is framed in a theatrical setting like a heightened theatrical zone. Clifford Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, 10. 10

the visitor to look for theatrical experiences even outside the conventional venues.39 These perspectives invite us to extend theatre and performance studies analysis beyond the events‘ overtly theatrical practices to include a more expansive discussion of the play activities, aesthetic displays, and dramaturgies that characterize each festival. With this in mind, three performance theorists—Erika Fischer-Lichte, Jill Dolan, and Baz Kershaw—play key roles in my argument. In Fischer-Lichte‘s Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual, she uses a phenomenological perspective to examine theatrical performances that she claims allow audiences and performers to tap into a realm of spiritual transformation. Her analysis of Max Reinhardt‘s Theatre of the Five Thousand provides a useful model for explaining community creation through performance, and serves as a loose outline for my chapters, as I shall soon discuss.40 Dolan's Utopia in Performance looks at certain political performances as sites for the creation of temporary collectivity based on social justice and egalitarianism.41 She writes provocatively on the significance of an audience gathering at the theatre: ―I see, in this social choice, potential for intersubjectivity not only between performer and spectators but among the audience, as well.‖42 The gathering of spectators—many of them strangers—in a liminoid setting holds, for Dolan, political potency; she sees theatre as a source for generating ―utopian performatives,‖ temporary experiences in which people can collectively envisage the possibility of a more socially just world: What happens when an audience reaches a level of comfort that dissipates the tension of strangeness that often charges spectators settling down so close to each other for an hour or two? Perhaps these more intimate audiences become micro civil societies sustained by groups much smaller than the demos or the working class or the mass of consumers or the nation [. . .]. They become part of the world

39 Willmar Sauter, ―Festivals as theatrical events: building theories‖ in Festivalising!: Theatrical Events, Politics, and Culture (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 19-20. 40 Erika Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre, (New York: Routledge, 2005). 41 Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 26. 42 Ibid., 11. 11

of family, friends, comrades and colleagues, where people are connected to one another and made responsible for one another.43 Participants at Burns, too, gather in a theatrical setting—a heightened theatrical zone—and live with one another over a period of days. Theoretically, then, similar effects to those of the theatre audience Dolan describes may be experienced by Burn attendees. The response of one Scorched Nuts participant demonstrates this; when asked about the people who attend Burns, she explained: They are, honestly, some of the most amazing people I've ever met. I've never gone to a burn and felt out of place or unwelcome. Everyone is friendly and willing to help another in need. It doesn't matter if you have been doing this for years and years, or if this is your first time. If you are unemployed or a multimillionaire. I've met everyone from your run of the mill minimum wage burger flipper to military personnel at burns. You will be welcomed, brought into the fold, and made part of the family.44 The notion that something approaching the concept of family might come about at these festivals indicates their ability to generate deep, intersubjective experiences. As Dolan writes, such experiences have political potential: ―Part of the power I see in utopian performatives is the way in which they might, by extension, resurrect a belief or faith in the possibility of social change, even if such change simply means rearticulating notions that have been too long discredited.‖45 I see Burns as attempts at creating a tangible (if unsustainable) utopia of this ilk through enacting alternative—perhaps more just—systems of economics and governance. They thus hold political power as rehearsals towards such a world. While I find Dolan‘s argument for the utopian performative sound and compelling, I am suspicious of her choice to examine performances housed in traditional theatrical spaces (Broadway and Regional theatres, for example) as sources for potent political activity in contemporary society. Baz Kershaw writes convincingly on this subject in The Radical in Performance; he sees theatres—by which he means the physical structures designated for performance—as ―spaces of domination‖ (a term he borrows from Henri Lefebvre) that are ―shaped by the ruling ideologies of society made for purposes of power and control that too often

43 Ibid., 26. 44 Questionnaire #001, Scorched Nuts participant, sent to the author on July 18, 2011. 45 Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 21. 12 work against the interests of the majority.‖46 Kershaw advocates moving outside of the traditional theatre venue and looking for ―performance beyond theatre‖ in order to find new expressions of freedom: ―What I am interested in centrally [. . .] is not the ways in which radical performance might represent such freedoms, but rather how radical performance can actually produce such freedoms, or at least a sense of them, for both performers and spectators, as it is happening.‖47 My examination of Burns is ultimately a search for elements of both Dolan‘s ―utopian performative,‖ and Kershaw's ―radical in performance,‖ an attempt to find a theatrical event outside of the theatre itself with the potential to foster intersubjectivity amongst spectator/artists as well as produce an alternative to mainstream society based on increased freedom and social justice. Methodology While there has been no shortage of documentation on the Burning Man festival—books, documentary films, online video clips, and substantial web and physical archives of festival promotional materials and ephemera—finding written sources on regional Burns has proven to be particularly challenging. Generally, the best written primary sources available were internet publications including blogs, chat forums, and the Burn websites (which show promotional resources and guidance). These materials, while sometimes unaccommodating or unreliable, helped me create profiles of the festivals as well as build my personal awareness of the current conversations going on in the burner community. To supplement them, I distributed questionnaires to Burn participants, asking about their festival experiences (see Appendices E, F, G, H), and interviewed participants and organizers after the events ended. Since a festival is a liminoid setting, one in which the experience might be ephemeral or not easily recalled once one has returned to quotidian life, the most important way I examined Scorched Nuts and Euphoria was by attending them as a participant-observer in the summer of 2011. Two other lived-in festivals I traveled to in the same year—Lakeland, Florida‘s Afterburn48 and Chillicothe, Illinois‘s Summer Camp Music Festival49—added further depth to

46 The author‘s emphasis. Baz Kershaw, The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard, (London: Routledge, 1999), 31. 47 Ibid. 18-19. 48 Afterburn is the ―sister burn‖ to Preheat, Florida‘s official Burn. However, for unspecified reasons, Afterburn is not currently sanctioned by Black Rock City LLC, and thus cannot be officially called a Burn. Nevertheless, it features all of the key elements of Burns—abiding by the Ten Principles and featuring an effigy (and its burning), for instance. Afterburn takes place in Lakeland, Florida in early November, and sold out with 750 attendees. It began in 2006. 13 my research. For all the events I studied, my methodology combined theoretical and festival background research, on-site observations, and participant interviews (both during and after the event). While at Euphoria and Scorched Nuts, my strategy—an admittedly Sisyphean task—was to negotiate the competing goals of observing and developing relationships with individuals immediately proximate to me (to gain a deeper understanding of their individual experiences at the festival), while still retaining as much dexterity as possible to mix with multiple groups and see diverse activities throughout the grounds. I freely admitted that I was studying the events I attended in an effort to get burners to open up about their personal Burn experiences, explain what they felt was most important about those experiences, and suggest activities to which I should pay particular attention. I sought to align my experience with that of an uninformed first- time burner, which, despite my scholarly preparation, I was. Through this alignment, though, I did not try to assume a liberal humanist perspective as a ―generic festivalgoer,‖ nor do I attempt to convey such a perspective in my writing here. It is important to disclose my own subject position as a white, heterosexual, middle-class male, and to acknowledge that all of these festivals were a vast majority white in makeup, and about evenly split in terms of gender demographics. Chapter Outline My thesis builds on Erika Fischer-Lichte‘s provocative study of community creation through theatre: Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual. Particularly influential to me was her dissection of how Max Reinhardt‘s Theatre of the Five Thousand functioned to bind its audience together through distinct theatrical conventions: ―What we can gather [. . .] is the idea that through Reinhardt‘s special devices, not only was a community of hundreds presented and represented in the orchestra to the spectators but also a community was brought forth in the course of the performance, a community of thousands, comprising performers and spectators alike.‖50 Fischer- Lichte proposes that the fashioning of this temporary community was made possible by three

49 The Summer Camp Music Festival is a four-day long lived-in event with approximately 35,000 attendees held in Chillicothe, Illinois in late May. Although it is not a Burn, I found observations from this festival extremely important to my thinking about how community formation and festival culture function in large-scale events compared to the smaller ones I focus on in this thesis. They were also helpful in extending my thinking about lived- in festivals to non-Burn events. 50 Understandably, due to the historical nature of the event studied, Fischer-Lichte had to limit her analysis primarily to reviews and recollections by theatre critics in the audience, rather than patrons in attendance. Part of my aim here is to broaden the pool of responses through ethnographic research to include the participants themselves in this contemporary context. Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual, 52. 14 main points: ―(1) the occupation of the space by the masses; (2) the way a particular atmosphere functions; (3) the dynamic and energetic bodies moving through the whole space.‖51 These points have proven useful as a general outline for my own analysis as well; to this end, each chapter, in order, corresponds to one of them. My first chapter outlines a theoretical argument for lived-in festivals as sites suited to creating intense, intersubjective relationships between their participants. It analyzes the political potential of such places by dispelling popular perceptions of festivals as realms of escape from the quotidian world, while proposing that some form of unmediated activity may still be possible through experiencing spontaneous communitas. In addition, I trouble the extent to which what happens at the festival stays at the festival, contemplating the ways in which anti-structural activities occurring in a liminoid setting might translate to the everyday world as well. Chapter two examines what I call the ―official‖ activities of Euphoria and Scorched Nuts—that is, activities orchestrated by festival staffs and which involve all or essentially all participants—to create an idea of the similarities and differences in these festivals‘ overarching dramaturgies (which I equate to Fischer-Lichte‘s idea of a ―particular atmosphere‖).52 It focuses on initiation procedures, the effigy burning, and the pre-burn ceremony called the Fire Conclave. Official activities, in my definition, also extend to include the rules and governance of the Burns and publicized materials on them. It is crucial to understand the dramaturgies of Euphoria and Scorched Nuts because they form the contours of the festival frame surrounding the interpersonal interactions that occur there. I argue that both festivals‘ dramaturgies establish trust between their participants and energize them to socialize with one another. They thus play critical roles in facilitating interactions that generate spontaneous communitas in each festival. My final chapter begins to discuss the innumerable unofficial activities of Burns by focusing on specific case studies observed at the 2011 Scorched Nuts. It is during these improvised, small-scale, often communal activities—which, unlike official activities, festival organizers do not directly structure—that I argue spontaneous communitas has the greatest potential to arise. I examine the popular Burn performance practices of object manipulation and fire spinning, participants‘ interactions with a unique theme camp, and their interpersonal

51 Ibid., 50. 52 On this, she writes: ―It is the atmosphere which binds performers and spectators together; atmosphere can be regarded as a kind of environment which results from and, at the same time, surrounds them, into which both are immersed.‖ Ibid., 54. 15 interactions while confronting bad weather on the festival grounds. These activities each placed participants in close physical contact with one another in extremely beautiful, intense, or playful settings. Hence, they correspond with Fischer-Lichte‘s third point: ―bodies moving together in time and space.‖ This third chapter completes a thesis-wide shift, moving from macro to micro; it begins with an overarching theoretical discussion, moves to an assessment of major themes and dramaturgies, and finally ends with an examination of specific interpersonal interactions (where I ultimately argue that communitas tends to occur). Thus, I attempt to illustrate a shift I hope to see reflected in future performance scholarship, discovering potential in the small, personal, and hidden, rather than the very large and publicly visible. Beyond the Party To confine our understanding of Burns to their material pleasures, to think of them as ―just a party‖ where one goes to get drunk or high and watch naked people cavort, ignores the heart of the festival experience. As radical philosopher Hakim Bey writes, ―The essence of the party: face-to-face, a group of humans synergize their efforts to realize mutual desires, whether for good food and cheer, dance, conversation, the arts of life; perhaps even for erotic pleasure, or to create a communal artwork, or to attain the very transport of bliss.‖53 He expresses festive celebration not as an opportunity to experience personal sensorial ecstasy, but as a chance to commune with others through shared, unmediated experiences. Most veteran burners I spoke to similarly pointed not to the drugs they had taken, the gifts they‘d been given, or even the art they had seen, but to the people they had met as the reason for their return to Burns year after year. They ventured to Scorched Nuts and Euphoria specifically to be with others unfettered by societal demands or televisual mediation. In a digital age in which socialization and aesthetic consumption increasingly occur electronically and within the confines of one‘s own home, such a gesture carries significant political weight. In this thesis, I explore the crucial role of the festival setting—and the performance and play therein—to building interpersonal connections. Such connections occur between friends or loved ones who grow closer through sharing the festival experience, between strangers who feel intimately connected after meeting for the first time, or between people who never talk to each

53 Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, originally published by Autonomedia, 1985, reprinted online by Mike Morrison on hermetic.com, accessed September 20, 2011, http://hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html. 16 other but come to feel familiar after sharing a space for several days. How can such unmediated experiences provoke reassessment of art‘s emancipatory capabilities in an age in which media and capitalism increasingly pervade every aspect of our lives? While I do not argue that Burns are in any way separate from these forces, I do suggest that, through involvement in a moving, shared experience—one communally created and to which, for an extended period of time, all of the participant‘s faculties are devoted—real feelings of unity and collective spirit might arise in the interstices of festival time. As Dolan suggests, ―the experience of performance, the pleasure of a utopian performative, even if it doesn‘t change the world, certainly changes the people who feel it.‖54 This change holds potential as an emancipatory action, one that might temporarily disrupt the alienation of an increasingly mediated contemporary US society.

54 Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 19. 17

CHAPTER ONE LIVED-IN FESTIVALS AND THE FORMATION OF PLAY COMMUNITIES

Like festivals, uprisings cannot happen every day—otherwise they would not be ―nonordinary.‖ But such moments of intensity give shape and meaning to the entirety of a life. - Hakim Bey55 Defining a Lived-in Festival Festivals with a strong cultural component to them, Burns or music festivals, for instance, allow patrons to escape traditional performance venues and experience aesthetic activities in unique spaces and circumstances. I am interested in the effect such an environment has on the ways in which participants perceive art as well as one another. What separates witnessing a performance in a theatre from seeing the same performance on the last day of a Burn, for instance? What are the effects of staying in a single environment over a lengthy period of time? In this chapter, I attempt to explore these questions by outlining a theoretical framework describing lived-in festivals as sites with a unique potential to foster the emergence of intersubjective community amongst its populace. I also discuss the political potential of such sites (focusing on Burning Man and Burns), particularly their emancipatory capabilities and limitations. To do this, however, it is first necessary to discuss in-depth what idea of lived-in festivals in order to clarify why I find these social phenomena uniquely potent and quite different from single-day festivals. I begin by breaking down the definition for a festival I proposed in the introduction: ―A leisurely gathering marked by its organizers as ‗joyous,‘ that is somehow distinguished from everyday life.‖ First, a festival is leisurely. It must be an activity participants elect to do rather than be required to do by state law, religious tenet, or financial necessity (as in someone whose job is to run a festival). The festival must be an event distinctly different from or outside of the day-today activities that structure a person‘s quotidian life, else it becomes subsumed into one‘s general idea of the status quo. If missing the event or improperly executing actions during it

55 Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone. 18 carries a significant external penalty, participation becomes a duty and a person‘s activities stay confined to those endorsed by the sponsoring authority. Leisurely events confer a degree of agency to the participating individual as they take place during the playtime of the capitalist work-play dynamic. I therefore characterize festivals as, to use Victor Turner‘s terms, liminoid rather than liminal genres, and the distinction is crucial.56 Although both genres describe events taking place in a transitional time when one is separated from the dominant social structure, liminoid genres function as commodities one elects to consume, while liminal genres signify rituals in which one is bound to partake.57 While Turner shows liminal genres (typical in tribal and non-industrialized societies) to be phenomena capable of generating revitalizing energy and heightened experiences, he ultimately characterizes their purpose as reinscribing the status quo; liminoid genres, however, he saw as capable of posing alternatives to the status quo, places from whence incremental change might arise.58 The liminoid serves as ―an independent domain of creative activity‖ which ―can generate and store a plurality of alternative models for living.‖59 While Turner calls these domains anti-structural, psychologist and play scholar Brian Sutton-Smith proposes that perhaps the better term might be ―proto-structural‖ since it ―is the precursor of innovative forms […] the source of new culture.‖60 Such places allow for invention and experimentation, potentially evoking new ideas, activities, and modes of being that might be carried into daily life. Second, a festival is a gathering marked by its organizers as “joyous.” Most primarily it is a meeting of people, an ―occupation of [a] space by the masses‖ to use Fischer-Lichte‘s

56 Here I depart from Burning Man scholars Lee Gilmore and Jeremy Hockett, who explicitly describe that event as liminal in nature. While I agree with Gilmore that to some participants Burning Man takes on a spiritual, almost religious quality, I also believe that the event‘s organizers construct it (physically and discursively) to foster such reception. Black Rock City LLC, we should not forget, is a for-profit enterprise which thrives in large part by creating an emotional tie between participants (customers) and the event (product). To regard Burning Man as liminal, rather than liminoid, obscures the event‘s status as an economically-drive activity by a for-profit company. 57 Turner writes: ―[Arnold] Van Gennep has shown that all rites of passage or ‗transition‘ are marked by three phases: separation, margin (or limen, signifying ―threshold‖ in Latin), and aggregation.‖ Liminal/liminoid genres thus occupy this middle phase where one is both separated from the structural world but also already on her way back towards re-entering it. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process, 94. 58 Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, 52-55. 59 Ibid., 33. 60 Brian Sutton-Smith, ―Games of order and disorder,‖ paper presented to the Forms of Symbolic Inversion Symposium of the American Anthropological Association, Toronto, Canada, December 1, 1972, 18-19. A concise article by Jeremy Hockett helped illuminate the intricacies of the discourse between Sutton-Smith and Turner on this subject and its significance as it relates to Burning Man. ―Burningman [sic] and the Ritual Aspects of Play,‖ published online December, 1999, https://www.msu.edu/~hockettj/Play.htm, accessed on December 15, 2011. 19 terms.61 I emphasize that these gatherings are not spontaneous, but rather, events orchestrated by organizers and/or owners who construct a dramaturgical frame that semiotically communicates a cheerful atmosphere. This frame may be constructed as simply as by placing the word ―festival‖ (with its general connotation of joyfulness) in a gathering‘s title, but also builds through the event‘s prescribed (―official‖) activities and structure, such as spatial arrangement, setting, and promotional materials. As an example of the ways in which Burning Man organizers integrate the notion of joy into the event‘s dramaturgy, consider Burning Man‘s icon, which appears on its official website and in much of its advertising media (Figure 1.1). Although the skeletal figure is polysemic (perhaps signifying freedom, victory, signaling for help, etc.),62 one clear way to read the symbol is as a person cheering or celebrating. Thus, the icon potentially implies that the festival is a time of joy and energetic wassail to prospective participants, influencing their choosing whether or not to attend, the attitude and materials they bring to the event, and the activities in which they participate while there. 63 And so, while Burning Man participants may themselves create nearly all of the festival‘s art, activities, and architecture, organizers‘ coding of the event still maintains a certain subtle control.

Figure 1.1: The Burning Man Icon (Public Domain)

An ancillary reason I emphasize festivals as being marked as joyous (rather than existing intrinsically so) is to remind us that although many participants attend festivals anticipating fun and frivolity, they do not constantly experience those emotions while there. Although the sense of occasion imparted through a festival‘s dramaturgy may temporarily alter participants‘

61 Erika Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual, 52. 62 Indeed, the ―meaning‖ of the Burning Man icon and effigy appears to be intentionally left as vague as possible to accommodate the projected meanings of many different people. Fischer-Lichte notes that Max Reinhardt used a similar tactic in order to allow community to emerge in his ―theatre for the masses‖ by performing texts that were free of direct political meanings to its audiences, such as Ancient Greek texts or the aptly titled Everyman. Ibid., 56. 63 I should briefly acknowledge the instability of semiotics in general and note that I choose to discuss this icon in order to show how non-discursive signifiers may impact how participants see and use the festival space. 20 perception—perhaps making them more enthusiastic or affable than in their quotidian life—they remain embodied subjects prone to physical exhaustion and negative emotions. Fatigue, boredom, and bodily discomfort are as much a part of festivals as joy and frivolity. This is particularly true of festivals lasting more than a single day. Third, a festival is somehow distinguished from everyday life. This distinction is both spatial (any festival must be somehow cordoned off from the quotidian world) and symbolic. For many festivals, including Euphoria, Scorched Nuts, and Burning Man, the spatial distinction lies in their being set away from major urban centers; however, not all such festivals are separated in this way. At Afterburn, for example, one can see the I-5 highway as well as a Coca-Cola factory64 from the festival grounds; even so, Afterburn organizers designate a specific barrier (in the form of a metal fence) to distinguish festival space from the world-at-large. A festival‘s physical boundary need not necessarily be concrete; it might be invisible, approximate, or malleable: Scorched Nuts took place in an open field flanked by a forest, and the treeline visually served as the event's unofficial border. Yet when participants began setting up hammocks and tents in the trees, the border gradually extended outward. Although the festival border was negotiated and malleable, it nonetheless existed tangibly—one could continue to walk further and further into the treeline and at some point would physically feel as if she was no longer at the festival. A festival‘s symbolic distinction from the everyday comes about through the dramaturgy inscribed on its literal space. Festival scholar Alessandro Falassi describes the coding process that goes into activating a festive area: ―The framing ritual that opens the festival is one of valorization [. . .] that modifies the usual and daily function and meaning of time and space. To serve as the theater of the festive events an area is reclaimed, cleared, delimited, blessed, adorned, forbidden to normal activities.‖65 For Burning Man and regional Burns this valorization happens in a number of ways (some of which will be discussed in detail in chapter two), but perhaps the most well-known is the traditional exclamation of ―Welcome Home!‖ by festival greeters upon one‘s entrance to the grounds. This utterance is performative in J.L. Austin‘s sense of the word, christening ostensibly ordinary land as a festive zone to the participant about to

64 This seemed to me somewhat ironic for a festival where participants are known to turn their shirts inside-out to avoid displaying corporate labels. 65 The author‘s emphasis. Alessandro Falassi, Time Out of Time: Essays on the Festival (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 4. 21 enter it.66 Seemingly normal space and time transform into an extraordinary ―time out of time,‖ as Falassi puts it, ―a special temporal dimension devoted to special activities.‖67 This characterizes festivals as occupying a mental space in addition to a material one. A participant must not only be physically present, but also cognitively aware of the place‘s purpose. The spatio-temporal shift Falassi describes is key to why I believe lived-in festivals contain such powerful proto-structural potential: because time and space, the most fundamental rules of everyday life, suddenly become exotic and must be reinvestigated, so too must all rules one normally takes for granted. Thus, experimentation with and testing of boundaries become integral to the festival experience.68 From users‘ investigative engagement with their new (though temporary) reality, novel social, aesthetic, economic, and jurisprudential systems might arise. At non-lived-in festivals, those in which participants must go home at the end of the day, these new systems may be easily discarded by participants upon exiting the grounds because of the brevity of their encounters with them. County fairs, for example, serve as temporarily unifying and equalizing spaces for typically stratified communities; for a brief time, members of different social classes mingle in a common area, eating the same foods and enjoying the same entertainments. While more egalitarian social practices potentially arise during this time of increased communality, participants generally shed such practices once the day ends. Class divisions begin to reassert themselves as soon as participants leave the festival grounds. Although major socio-cultural and economic dynamics similarly reassert themselves after participants return from lived-in festivals, I argue that by spending a significant length of time in a festival environment some practices developed there may be able to stick. As time progresses at the festival, one‘s body adjusts to the physical actions it repeatedly executes on a daily basis, and some of these practices may follow the participant into the quotidian world. Dance scholar Carrie Noland refers to such actions as ―gestures,‖ defined as ―organized forms of kinesis

66 J.L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words, Second Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975). 67 Alessandro Falassi, Time Out of Time, 4. 68 One example of such experimentation is participants‘ establishment of an alternative marketplace at music festivals ancillary to the shops and eateries provided by the festival organizers. At the Summer Camp Music Festival, for instance, a forested area (which conferred some cover from police and security) became a commercial hotspot where paintings, glass pipes, food, and drugs were sold in open air with vendors side by side as if at a flea market. Matthew Sheptoski documents similar fascinating economic practices as they relate to Grateful Dead concerts in his article ―Vending at Dead Shows: The Bizarre Bazaar,‖ in Deadhead Social Science, edited by Rebecca G. Adams and Robert Sardiello, (New York: AltaMira Press, 2000), 157-182. 22 through which subjects navigate and alter their worlds.‖69 Noland sees gestures as partly self- created and partly products of one‘s daily environmental reality: ―a gesture—communicative, instrumental, or aesthetic—draws on a kinesthetic background; in order to move, the subject must rely not only on learned routines and personal or collective desires but also on her engagement, her embeddedness, what Martin Heiedegger calls her ‗everyday being-in-the world.‘‖70 Gestures, then, are not simply physical actions, but physicalized modes of being. While single-day festivals are too short to allow for gestural acquisition—one might learn new physical practices, but for lack of time spent with them these cannot sink into the body as a daily way of being—lived-in festivals last long enough to allow new physical processes to entrench themselves, becoming more difficult to shrug off upon return to the default world. These gestural remnants can lead to behaviors in everyday life that reflect the temporary world created at a festival, and therefore attest to the potential these events have to generate material effects.71 I noticed subtle changes in my own daily behavior when I returned from Euphoria and Scorched Nuts: an impulse to pick up litter, a greater willingness to speak with strangers, an easier time being outdoors in the heat. While such relatively benign changes might seem insignificant, the idea that lived-in festivals create opportunities for gestural acquisition opens up the possibility that socially progressive actions or systems encountered there might carry over and integrate into one‘s daily life and be transmitted to the world-at-large. This, however, should be seen as an illustration of the potential for change coming about through the lived-in setting, rather than an expectation that it necessarily will. Although gestures are acquired through physical practices, I argue that the degree to which they gain symbolic significance to the user in the liminoid realm plays a crucial role in making them transportable to the quotidian world. Actions that individuals perceive as important or memorable during a festival will less likely be discarded upon leaving. Lived-in festivals— particularly Burns with their saturation of aesthetic expression—generally exist as spaces of

69 Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 4. 70 Ibid., 16. 71 This would seem, at first, to challenge Richard Schechner‘s characterizing of liminoid rituals as ―transportations,‖ events that ―effect a temporary change—sometimes nothing more than a brief experience of spontaneous communitas or a several-hours-long performance of a role… [a spectator] is ‗moved‘ or ‗touched‘ (apt metaphors) and is then dropped off about where she or he entered.‖ The ―about‖ Schechner articulates here is key. Indeed, vestiges of the liminoid can spill over into the structural world and remain tangibly visible through bodily practice. While these practices are generally subtle, they may accumulate over time to eventually result in significant transformation. Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, (New York: Routledge, 2006), 63. My emphasis. 23 substantial theatricality and illusion in addition to being places for concrete social practice. Consider, for example, Burn participants‘ tradition of assuming an illusory burner name or adopting an ostentatious costume upon entering the festival grounds. This effectively renders them characters in a festival narrative in addition to being ordinary people. The jostling of the physical world against the illusory one creates a discomfiting experience where neither world is stable, a situation Fischer-Lichte calls ―perceptual multistability,‖ which she describes using the example of ―the oscillating focus [in performance] between the actor‘s specific corporeality and the character portrayed.‖72 This feeling of inbetween-ness, of being part of both a material and an illusory experience, opens up participants to embracing the new, and allows for greater flexibility with one‘s usual daily practices. It is this idea, I believe, that underlies the significance Clupper attaches to her seeing Burning Man as a heightened theatrical zone. She notes: ―It is possible that by having an experience outside of their normal realm of being, participants are open to a truth about their nature, and their potential new relationship to others culturally, in this heightened theatrical space.‖73 The theatrical and illusory qualities of the festival concretely affect participants by opening them up to new social formations with others—potentially to the creation of community. We might think of community-making as a type of gestural system, one with a series of associated daily physical practices that may be acquired and integrated into one‘s life.74 Thus, if community arises at a festival, the practices that create and sustain it might, like other gestures, follow the participant into the everyday world when the festival ends and create opportunities for community-making there. “Emancipation” at the Lived-in Festival In addition to creating a heightened aesthetic experience, lived-in festivals can produce in participants feelings of emancipation from the social and behavioral strictures of the outside world. Consider this survey response by a festivalgoer regarding her experience at the Summer Camp Music Festival: ―At my local street fair I did not feel nearly as FREE as I felt at Summer Camp. I felt completely removed from society.‖75 A questionnaire response I received from a

72 Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, (New York: Routledge, 2008), 147. 73 Wendy Clupper, ―The Performance Culture of Burning Man‖, 171. 74 While these practices differ for each instance, some potentially include introducing yourself to others, feeling comfortable with those around you, maintaining affable relations, helping others in need, etc. 75 Questionnaire #010, sent to the author on August 8, 2011. Respondent‘s emphasis. 24 participant at Afterburn echoes this sentiment: ―At a burn [I] can [be] 100% myself, [while] in everyday life I am probably 70% myself (at least at work).‖76 Both responses allude to feelings of emancipation felt due to the suspension of societal obligations for a temporary period. Yet I find it important to trouble this notion of a lived-in festival as an escape from rules, duties, and discipline, and instead characterize these feelings of emancipation as the result of a dramaturgical construct created by festival organizers. Despite these respondents feeling more free, lived-in festivals are also inherently un-free, potentially even more so than everyday life (depending on the rules of the festival). Most fundamentally, their boundaries, regulations, and spatial arrangements constrain participants‘ movements and actions. At the Summer Camp Music Festival, for instance, certain areas of the grounds were off-limits unless one had purchased a more costly VIP badge. At Burns, not only is one supposed to stay physically within the festival boundaries at all times, but cell phone use is socially frowned upon (if not banned outright) as an attempt to perforate these boundaries and allow vestiges of quotidian life to seep in and ―poison‖ the environment. Euphoria even maintains an ―In/Out Policy‖ which requires participants who leave the space to either pay a thirty-dollar reentry fee or present fifteen pieces of ―schwag‖ (small gifts) to give to fellow participants.77 Although some of these rules were more vigorously enforced than others, their very presence in promotional materials such as the Burns‘ ―Survival Guides‖ informs (but does not guarantee) how participants will act in the festival space. A crucial aspect of any lived-in festival, therefore, is discovering what the rules are and how they may be negotiated. Like city planners, festival organizers map out the event space for maximum efficiency, encouraging participants to take certain paths, see certain sites, and meet certain people, ostensibly controlling their experience. Take, for example, Burning Man and its location in the Black Rock Desert. The desert itself—flat land in which a person can move in any direction she desires—constitutes what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call ―smooth space,‖ the space in which a person may distribute herself where she wishes. Onto this smooth space, Burning Man places a city grid, complete with cross streets, barriers, and off-limits areas. The festival, in fact, creates ―striated space‖ in which ―one closes off a surface and ‗allocates‘ it according to

76 Questionnaire #018, sent to the author on October 30, 2011. 77 ―Euphoria 2011 Survival Guide,‖ euphoria.com, accessed on January 15, 2012, 9. 25 determinate intervals.‖78 The desert becomes no longer a tabula rasa but a governed landmark where participants cannot move about freely; they are instead moved according to the festival‘s infrastructural determinants. In this sense, the festival is not only un-free, but controlling.79 How, then, do these sites manufacture feelings of emancipation in participants? At first glance, lived-in festivals may appear to resonate with Hakim Bey‘s concept of temporary autonomous zones (T.A.Z.‘s), temporary festive gatherings ―off-the-grid,‖ so to speak, in which participants reclaim a space for the purposes of living intensely and free of mediation for a brief time.80 Bey‘s writing on the T.A.Z. served as a foundational text for Burning Man‘s initial conception and continues to be used by organizers and participants today as a theoretical justification of the event‘s counter-cultural capacity. He describes the T.A.Z. as having a rebellious nature towards a State apparatus ―primarily concerned with simulation over substance‖; viewing lived-in festivals in such a way creates the impression that while at the event one is on an island, in complete isolation from the outside world.81 In reality, though, forces of quotidian life constantly insert themselves into lived-in festivals. At the music festivals I attended, local police patrolled the grounds for violent behavior or the distribution of hard drugs; at Euphoria and Scorched Nuts, a fire marshal observed the controlled effigy burns. Moreover, all of the festivals I studied charged an entrance fee, and thus interacted with the dominant market system. Perhaps, then, instead of viewing festivals as T.A.Z.‘s, we might more appropriately view them through Michel Foucault‘s concept of heterotopias. These are spaces he describes as ―counter-sites, [kinds] of effectively enacted utopia[s] in which the real sites [. . .] are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.‖82 Events such as music festivals, Burning Man, or regional Burns might be considered heterotopias of compensation, places ―as meticulous [and] well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled.‖83 Such places (theme parks might also be a good example) exist as idyllic fantasylands

78 Gilles Deleuze and F lix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 1988), 481. 79 This was more apparent at Euphoria, which had a map designating ―quiet zones‖ and featured narrow walkways for participants to move through the space, than Scorched Nuts, which did not have an officially designated quiet area (though an unofficial one organically came about) and, taking place in a field, was more wide open. 80 Hakim Bey, Temporary Autonomous Zone. 81 Ibid. 82 Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, ―Of Other Spaces,‖ Diacritics, 16.1 (Spring, 1986), 22-27. Accessed online on November 28, 2011. http://www.colorado.edu/envd/courses/envd4114-001/Fall09/Theory/Foucault- Other%20Spaces.pdf. 83 Ibid. 26 constructed to foreground pleasurable or exciting activities that contrast the tedium of everyday life. Seen this way, it is easy to understand why those who elect to attend lived-in festivals see them as utopian arenas of freedom and agency, but Foucault characterizes heterotopias as still operating under the auspices of the society that houses it.84 The perceived freedom that participants enjoy in festivals such as Burning Man, music festivals, and regional Burns depends on a temporary acceptance of that liberty by society proper. A story from the 2001 Burning Man illustrates this point: A local police deputy patrolling the festival ordered a gay men‘s camp called Jiffy Lube to take down or hide from public view its central art piece—a twelve-foot-tall mechanical sculpture portraying oral sex between two naked men—because ―it was a violation of prevailing community standards.‖ Participants sought to protest the censorship by parading the piece throughout the festival grounds, but were discouraged by Burning Man founder and executive director Larry Harvey, who worried that an obscenity arrest would make it impossible to obtain a permit for the space the next year. After Harvey‘s address, the crowd eventually subsided and the art piece was taken away.85 The episode clearly demonstrates that Burning Man, despite being physically removed from major urban settings and allowing certain additional freedoms like drug use and nudity, still operates under the auspices of local authority. The liberties the event offers participants are provided not only by the festival staff, but by civic authorities as well. For instance, law enforcement presumably knows that illegal drugs are openly consumed at regional Burns, but makes no effort to arrest those present or shut down the festivals. This shows a societal demarcation of these sites as zones for licensed deviance. Although one may feel free in such areas, one still acts (even without realizing it) within the confines of societal law and custom.

84 What, then, of those who created it? A cynic would say that the creator perceives the festival as merely a chance to extract the maximum payment from festivalgoers for the minimum cost, a charge recently levied at Burning Man in a New York Times article by Jessica Bruder. While I wholeheartedly ascribe to this cynical outlook when examining large-scale music festivals like Bonnaroo or Summer Camp—owned by large corporations like MTV and Jay Goldberg Events—I find it a murkier argument with Burning Man and Burns, where festival organizers are also active participants and often unsalaried. Jessica Bruder, ―The Changing Face of the Burning Man Festival,‖ The New York Times, August 27, 2011, accessed on the New York Times website. October 8, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/business/growing-pains-for-burning-man-festival.html?pagewanted=all. 85 Brian Doherty, ―Desert Censorship: Artistic Paradise Lost?‖, Reason Magazine (December, 2001 issue), Accessed on Reason.com, October 24, 2011. Larry Harvey, ―Jiffy Lube, 2001,‖ Burning Man website, accessed Mar. 17, 2012, http://www.burningman.com/blackrockcity_yearround/jrs/extras/jiffylube.html. The latter article provides a commentary on the episode from Larry Harvey‘s perspective and serves as a thorough exploration of Burning Man‘s negotiation between its preferred rules and those of society proper. 27

Seen thus, despite Black Rock City LLC‘s continued reference to the T.A.Z. in promotional materials to build a dramaturgy that communicates alterity, immediacy, and counter-culture, the event itself, in its highly publicized and annualized form, ultimately misrepresents Bey‘s concept. A principle conceit in his formulation of the T.A.Z. was that the event must not be stationary, annualized, or promoted so that it could not be crushed by or subsumed into the State. In this sense, by becoming established and entrenched Burns and Burning Man actually betray Bey‘s political mission. Although they create dramaturgies signifying emancipation, they produce only simulacra of freedoms. Communitas in the Festival Setting What, if any, truly emancipatory capabilities do Burns and Burning Man then hold? The answer, I argue, lies not in the material freedoms available at the festival, but within the festival participants and their ability to generate spontaneous communitas. Turner saw communitas as a mode of being characterized by a temporary shedding of rank, class distinctions, and mediation in favor of equality, camaraderie, and immediacy that tended to occur during liminal and liminoid periods. To Turner, communitas (which he sometimes used interchangeably with his term anti-structure) was a threatening force to overarching societal authorities: ―[F]rom the perspectival viewpoint of those concerned with the maintenance of ‗structure,‘ all sustained manifestations of communitas must appear as dangerous and anarchical, and have to be hedged around with prescriptions, prohibitions, and conditions.‖86 Communitas resembles the core attributes of Bey‘s revolutionary T.A.Z.—immediate, intense, and fleeting (that is, unable to be captured as a series of normative relations)—and is explicitly referenced by Dolan in her writings on the utopian performative: ―moments of communitas […]offer springboards towards utopia.‖87 Communitas creates a transitory affront to Authority in general and does so through establishing egalitarian and socially just relationships and actions. As spontaneous communitas is a personal mode of being that arises organically, usually fleetingly, festivals can never assuredly produce spontaneous communitas in participants. But through certain spatial arrangements and dramaturgical practices (say, allowing participants a safe space in which to convene with one another), they may facilitate its development. While this rebuffs the notion that Burns are inherently anti-structural (as their promotional materials might

86 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process, 109. 87 Jill Dolan, ―Performance, Utopia, and the ‗Utopian Performative,‘‖ Theatre Journal, 53.3 (October, 2001), Johns Hopkins University Press, 473; Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance. 28 lead one to believe), it characterizes them as liminoid zones from which anti-structural relationships might arise. A Euphoria participant alludes to a felt, but unseen, communal potentiality in Burns: ―There is a sense of unity at these things—a shared affiliation with something hidden within the folds of the social fabric.‖88 She hints at a relational glue— communitas, I suggest—that binds participants together while inside the festival environment. Although the generation of communitas necessarily depends heavily on the individuals involved, the material conditions of Burns facilitate this ―sense of unity‖ in a number of concrete ways: By encouraging participants (through dramaturgy and spatial arrangement) to camp in close proximity to others, Burns create a material condition that fosters increased sociality and bodily contact between participants. Because they happen outdoors over a period of days, festivals impede some of the methods people typically use to maintain a social front (i.e., grooming, hygiene, or keeping up one‘s personal appearance). Normally private activities like sexual intercourse, bathing, or defecation must be done in semi-public areas. In place of their ―morning routines‖ (usually done in the privacy of one‘s bathroom), participants wait in long lines of groggy, dirty, and unkempt people in front of the few port-a-lets, shower stations, or water spigots available. This contact with the natural human body and its biological processes breeds a sort of intimacy (if, perhaps, an awkward one) between participants, since what normally remains private becomes publicly shared; participants recognize one another‘s mutual corporeality. Similar emphasis on the natural human body may be found in participants‘ art work at Burns, much of which might be described as ―carnivalesque.‖ Mikhail Bakhtin coined this term to describe genres that emphasize a festive spirit of the masses and foreground (in often grotesquely exaggerated form) bodily processes such as eating, drinking, defecation, and copulation. He saw the exposure of the biological human body—normally covered-up and/or ignored during daily civic life—as a crucial component to temporarily inverting social hierarchies and establishing the rule of the masses during festive times. Bakhtin called this the ―material bodily principle,‖ described thusly: ―the material bodily principle is contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are

88 Questionnaire #002, sent to the author on July 18, 2011. By ―these things‖ he explicitly mentioned not only Euphoria but other lived-in festivals such as Rainbow Gatherings, Grateful Dead Shows, and ―various other bizzaro- fests.‖ 29 continually growing and renewed.‖89 Burning Man participants rallying around the Jiffy Lube installation—a grotesque amplification of sexual contact—provides a clear example of this principle in action, showing how carnivalesque art can energize and unite participants. Carnivalesque aesthetics abound at Burns: Camp Happy Cock at Afterburn decorated its campsite with large phalluses which they invited other participants to paint; Camp Death Barbie hung stripped Barbie and Ken dolls that had been smeared with blood in macabre and/or sexually explicit positions.90 Some social activities at Burns might also be considered carnivalesque: at Scorched Nuts, for example, participants set up a Slip-n-Slide, took off all their clothes, and gleefully launched themselves down it while nude. Other participants soon joined in, and the activity culminated in approximately twenty people flying down the slide and stacking into a pile of flailing, laughing, naked bodies at the end. The activity seemed a pure expression of joy and an organic moment of togetherness involving what were mostly strangers. Bakhtin notes that, ―festive folk laughter [deriving from such carnivalesque activities] presents an element of victory not only over supernatural awe, over the sacred, over death; it also means the defeat of power, of earthly kings, of earthly classes, of all that oppresses and restricts.‖91 He here characterizes the joyous feeling generated from carnivalesque art and activity as an equalizing force, one capable of disrupting dominant power arrangements and social structures in much the same way that Turner‘s communitas does. While the presence of carnivalesque art and activities, and the placing of participants in close proximity to one another, present material ways in which Burns facilitate communitas, equally important are the events‘ dramaturgies, which—through their effect on participants‘ perceptions—encourage socialization and openness. The Ten Principles that undergird Burning Man and Burns serve as the most crucial elements of this dramaturgy; these principles act as rules of the game, fundamentally shaping participants‘ art and social actions, and describing the festival‘s alterity from everyday life. The principle of ―decommodification,‖ for example, clearly

89 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 19. 90 While the intent of this display seemed to be to express anti-corporate or anti-consumerist sentiment, it is important to note the disturbing nature of such a scene in terms of the images of domestic abuse and/or sexual violence it possibly brings to mind. This should call our attention to the gender politics present in the art and activity of Burns. As I discovered after embarking on this project, these have remained woefully understudied in Burning Man scholarship, and while this study does not focus on this critical area, I strongly advocate gendered and raced readings of Burns and Burning Man in future research. 91 Ibid., 92. 30 contrasts with the dominant market system—a rule of the game (so to speak) in quotidian life. By creating explicit rules set in contrast to the dominant, driving forces of late capitalist society, Burns reflexively focus participants on overarching aspects of quotidian life generally taken for granted. This, as Turner notes, also aids in creating communitas: ―[C]ommunitas is made evident or accessible, so to speak, only through its juxtaposition to, or hybridization with, aspects of social structure.‖92 Furthermore, the artificiality of festival rules exposes the arbitrariness and mutability of typically unquestioned laws in quotidian life. For instance, as Burns encourage participants to temporarily engage in economic practices emphasizing the principles of ―decommodification‖ and ―giving,‖ their participants may learn to recognize and question the relative absence of such practices in daily life under the global market system. A blog entry posted by a Scorched Nuts participant in response to that festival reflects this sentiment: ―It seems everyone is shaking off our dominant consumerist culture these days. [. . .] It begins with a fundamental question: If you consciously chose what customs and structures surrounded you rather than accepting what‘s been given, what would you choose?‖93 The entry expresses an understanding of the dominant culture of consumerism as a choice rather than an inevitability, and seems to posit its alterability by simply ―opting out‖ and playing by a different set of rules. This talk of rules should remind us that festivals are essentially play- or game-worlds, created and sustained not only through physical activity, but—like any game involving imagination—through a (sometimes tacit) collective agreement upon what does and does not belong. Play scholar Johan Huizinga notes that despite modern tendencies to regard games as frivolous, interactions in the game world often carry a level of seriousness for this very reason: The rules of a game are absolutely binding and allow no doubt. Paul Valery once in passing gave expression to a very cogent thought when he said: ‗No skepticism is possible where the rules of a game are concerned, for the principle underlying them is an unshakable truth [. . .]. Indeed, as soon as the rules are transgressed the

92 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process, 126. 93 Lily Berman, ―A Weekend in Never-Never Land,‖ Pick Up America Blog, June 16, 2011, accessed January 11, 2012, http://pickupamerica.org/blog/lily-berman?page=1#/blog/lily-berman/weekend-never-never-land. 31

whole play-world collapses. The game is over. The umpire‘s whistle breaks the spell and sets ―real‖ life going again.94 Huizinga‘s depiction of the play world‘s fragility positions those who maintain it as closely united in this imaginative preservation. In the context of a festival, this idea leads to the conclusion that participants‘ collective imagining, creation, and utilization of the festival space binds them together. This is especially true at Burns, where, due to the lack of organizer- provided activities, participants have an increased responsibility in building the play-world‘s architecture and deciding how it is to be used. While participants express their individuality through choices in dwelling, decoration, and action, they simultaneously contribute to creating the public space that all present call their own. All of these attributes of Burns—their spatial practices, carnivalesque art and activities, and dramaturgical framing—are conducive to communitas arising, although there is no guarantee that it will. Spontaneous communitas (as its name implies) happens unexpectedly on a personal level, and not all participants will either engage in activities that might inspire it, or even be open to such an experience in the first place. However, those that do experience communitas in the festival setting may perhaps become opened up (sometimes to complete strangers) to the type of intersubjective experience normally reserved only for those closest to the individual. Feelings of familial unity may arise even with those one has met for only a brief period of time. Such experiences are addictive and, as Turner notes, often held to be sacred or holy.95 They forge enduring connections between those who share the experience, creating a community based on an egalitarian social model that may appear threatening to authority (inside and outside the festival), and thus, emancipatory. They also present opportunities to practice the gestures that sustain such deep communal ties, which, as discussed earlier, may be brought back to the quotidian world. Conclusions: Political Possibilities Turner saw a competitive relationship between communitas and structure in all societies: one cannot experience immediacy of the former for too long before inevitably falling back into the mediacy of the latter. This helps explain another key aspect of lived-in festivals—their temporariness. Like a game, festivals must be played out within certain boundaries of time, else

94 Johan Huizinga, ―Nature and Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon,‖ in Ritual, Play, and Performance, Eds. Richard Schechner and Mady Schuman, (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 54. 95 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process, 127. 32 they will eventually come to replace structure itself. Likewise, participants‘ interactions and routines while experiencing communitas will inevitably calcify into a hardened set of social relations. It is the ephemeral nature of spontaneous communitas that proves to be anti-structural, and this is the key element at work in Bey, Bakhtin, and Dolan‘s formulations. Liminality eventually gives way to a reintegration of participants into society proper, stifling (though not completely eliminating) the potential for communitas. What remains to be discussed, then, are the possible tangible effects that communitas generated inside a temporary lived-in festival might have on the quotidian world. Jill Dolan‘s writing on utopian performatives begins to address this question. Dolan believes a profound moment of communitas that comes about during live performance, ―lifts everyone slightly above the present, into a hopeful feeling of what the world might be like if every moment of our lives were as emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking, and intersubjectively intense.‖96 These moments, like the Brechtian gestus ―crystallize social relations and offer them to spectators for critical contemplation,‖ thus constituting a sort of rehearsal for revolution.97 In a lived-in festival this rehearsal is both symbolic, as Dolan notes, but also physical. Participants not only see the possibility for a better, more just and equal world, but embody it. In doing so over a period of days, they acquire the gestural code (to return back to Noland‘s work) that characterizes their experiences of community, vestiges of which remain in the participant‘s body after the festival ends. In this way, although communitas cannot be sustained for a significant length of time, some actions associated with it might make their way into a person‘s everyday life—tangible steps in the direction of progress towards a more just and equal society. Furthermore, Huizinga notes the enduring interconnectedness felt between members of play-communities (such as festival participants) even after the game ends: ―[T]he feeling of being ‗apart together‘ in an exceptional situation, of sharing something important, of mutually withdrawing from the rest of the world and rejecting the usual norms, retains its magic beyond the duration of the individual game.‖98 Thus, it should come as no surprise that Burn participants continue to connect to one another even outside the festival zone. For example the Cincinnati- based KOIpound, an artistic collective operated by Scorched Nuts organizers, creates multiple events throughout the year to foster ongoing contact between that festival‘s participants. Some of

96 Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 5-6. 97 Ibid., 7. 98 Johan Huizinga, ―The Nature and Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon,‖ 54. 33 these events include fire spinning expositions and classes, potlucks, meet ‗n‘ greets, and trips to other Burns. Other participants I interviewed described receiving substantial favors—invitations for a lengthy stay at an apartment, for instance—from individuals with whom they had shared a single Burn experience. These tangible, ongoing connections attest to the potency of the lived-in festival experience and the ability for communitas felt there to forge close, enduring relationships. Richard Schechner has described Turner—and, by implication, Dolan—as ―an optimist, if not an outright utopian‖ who predicted that ―the liberated and disciplined body itself, with its many untapped resources for pleasure, pain, and expression, would lead the way to a better world.‖99 Schechner‘s phrasing expresses a certain doubt in this outlook and (although I personally embrace Turner‘s sanguinity) his pause shows the necessity of considering other factors before assuming the communitas generated at a lived-in festival as inherently politically progressive. The festival‘s dramaturgy must be considered. What principles—explicitly or tacitly, intentionally or unintentionally—does it promote? How much diversity is there in the festival population? It is, after all, much easier to establish compassionate connections between people who already identify with one another based on attributes such as race, class, or sexual orientation. I, like Dolan and Turner, see the need for a continued search for a utopic world based on social justice and equality, even if the task seems Sisyphean. To me, the operative questions is: in a structural system that increasingly compartmentalizes individuals, where can we find opportunities to develop intersubjective relationships with new people—both those like ourselves but whom we haven‘t personally met, as well as those who we feel different from (in terms of race, class, gender, politics, sexuality, etc.) and whom we rarely encounter in meaningful ways during daily life? Simply put, in a system that teaches individuals to value personal achievement at the expense of collective prosperity, how can we learn to encounter others with acceptance, rather than suspicion and guardedness? My intention is that the theoretical model I have articulated here provides a viable approach to these two questions. The next two chapters consider this model in action by looking specifically at the dramaturgy that governs Scorched Nuts and Euphoria and (through Scorched Nuts case studies) the participant interactions that generate communality in those events.

99 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 62. 34

CHAPTER TWO INDUCTING THE POPULACE: OFFICIAL ACTIVITIES OF SCORCHED NUTS AND EUPHORIA

At about eight o‘clock on the final night of Scorched Nuts, participants left their campsites and headed towards ―Center Camp,‖ an open field of approximately 75 square yards where the effigy and a pair of art installations stood. There was no official program for the evening‘s activities—indeed, no program existed for the Burn as a whole100—but information circulated by word-of-mouth that the effigy burning and preceding ceremony (the Fire Conclave or Conclave) would soon commence. As darkness fell participants clad themselves in outlandish costumes (usually involving something neon) and brought along LED lights, glow sticks, and any other objects they hoped to light afire in celebration during the ceremonial event and subsequent all-night celebration. The Conclave and effigy burning, which I will describe in detail later in this chapter, took place at about nine o‘clock and involved what appeared to be the entirety of the Burn‘s population.101 Although no one was forced to attend, there did not seem to be activities going on anywhere else in the festival bounds. Theme camps were left unmanned and sound amplifiers and projected music visualizers, which generally played non-stop from the early evening into the early morning hours, were shut down. The only organized activities were the events going on inside the large circle the populace formed around the effigy at Center Camp. While participant-created activities take up most of the time at Burns, the Conclave and effigy burning are examples of the few events that 1) festival organizers (rather than participants) orchestrate, 2) are common across all regional Burns,102 and 3) involve all or essentially all who enter the festival, either through participation or observation. This chapter describes these ―official activities,‖ outlining their importance to establishing an imagined group identity that

100 The online ―Schedule of Events‖ for Scorched Nuts cheekily reads: ―All of the Events are hiding right now… We'll keep you updated as they tag base!‖ Scorched Nuts Official Website, accessed May 31, 2011, http://www.scorchednuts.org/cms/node/4. 101 Though it was not possible to verify whether everyone present at the Burn actually attended the Conclave and effigy burning, the vast majority certainly did. 102 The entry about the effigy in the survival guide for Scorched Nuts reads: ―The burning of the effigy is the climax of any burn.‖ ―Scorched Nuts Survival Guide,‖ Scorched Nuts Official Website, accessed May 31, 2011, http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/about_burningman/bm_timeline.html. 35 creates trust and encourages socialization during the Burn. Both of these components are vital to allowing intersubjective experiences to come about during the festival‘s unofficial events. The official activities of a Burn or any lived-in festival, I argue, play a crucial role in shaping the perception of that event by both its populace and the general public. One might understand official activities as structural high points, defining moments of the festival that other activities fit around. They occupy places of prominence amid the innumerable unofficial activities that occur while participants live in the festival space, communicate relatively uniform dramaturgical signifiers to all participants, create shared experiences and a common vocabulary, and heavily shape each festival‘s atmosphere. As Fischer-Lichte points out, ―the way a particular atmosphere functions‖ is integral to the process of engendering community in a theatrical space.103 Thus, analyzing the official activities of a festival assists in defining the event‘s mise en scène (so to speak) within which community might be generated. In this chapter, I discuss the official activities of Scorched Nuts and Euphoria. What similar atmospheric qualities do these two Burns share? How do formal and aesthetic dissimilarities in their official activities contribute to creating each Burn‘s unique ―feel‖? What effects might each Burn‘s particular atmosphere have on facilitating deep, communal experiences between participants? While I minimize attempts to explicitly outline answers to these questions, I hope that my descriptions of these festivals‘ official activities will begin to create impressions of each event that might bring some clarity to them. From my observations of Scorched Nuts, Euphoria, and Afterburn, and my archival research on other regional events and Burning Man itself, I have identified four aspects that seem common, at least in their general design, across all Burns: 1) rules and guidance for each festival; 2) entry procedures to the festival; 3) the Fire Conclave; and 4) the burning of the effigy on each festival‘s final night. I remark on all of these activities in the course of this chapter; my aim is to show that Burns‘ official activities utilize theatricality and dramaturgical signifiers that mark the space as a site for community construction, encouraging socialization and open-mindedness. Central to Fischer-Lichte‘s discussion of community emerging through theatrical performance is the Durkheimian line of thought that ―communities emerge when groups collectively perform a ritual‖; we might well think of certain official activities (the Conclave and

103 Erika Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual, 52. 36 effigy burning, most obviously) as examples of such collectively performed rituals.104 However, Durkheim‘s notions were based upon his concept of solidarity, the structural glue that holds societies together based on common experiences and moral beliefs. Although solidarity bears some resemblance to communitas, Turner notes that the two are ―strikingly different.‖ While solidarity often depends on an ―in-group/out-group contrast,‖ bringing together one community by articulating its differences from other communities, communitas entails an acceptance of all humankind.105 Some official activities of Burns—specifically the rules and guidance and entry procedures—mark the festivals as apart from and opposed to quotidian life, and thus operate on this in-group/out-group contrast. I therefore argue that they do not create community (in the deep sense, based on intersubjectivity), but rather facilitate amiable encounters between participants; thus, official activities open up the way for communitas to occur during the less structured ―unofficial activities‖ of the festival (discussed in chapter three), where participants may more freely engage with one another. Rules and Enforcement As I discussed in chapter one, despite many participants‘ feelings of emancipation, all lived-in festivals are governed by both implicit and explicit rules. For Burns, the most fundamental example of these rules is the list of Burning Man‘s ―Ten Principles,‖ which governs all such events. Black Rock City LLC, the company in charge of licensing regional events in Burning Man‘s name, requires that all Burns comply with these principles or face censure and, if necessary, suspension of the event.106 Black Rock City LLC requires that all regional Burn websites include the Ten Principles, and the tenets‘ prominence in media and burner culture exerts a significant impact on participants by most basically outlining how they are expected to conduct themselves upon entering the festival grounds.

104 Her observations were made in reference to late 19th- and early 20th-century theatre directors who aimed to insert elements of festival and collective action into their works. By doing so, she argues, the directors in some cases are able to establish a temporary community for the duration of the performance. Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance, 53. 105 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process, 132. 106 The webpage for the Burning Man Regionals Network notes that regional contacts: ―[A]re bound by a Letter of Understanding that expresses their agreement to assume the responsibilities of the role, as well as their commitment to Burning Man's Ten Principles, which represent the core values that define the Burning Man culture.‖ Indeed, regional events can lose their status as Burns for failing to uphold these principles (most commonly coming in the form of failing to Leave No Trace). ―Introduction to the Regionals Network,‖ Burning Man official website, accessed January 24, 2012, http://regionals.burningman.com/regionals_intro.html. 37

As previously noted, the Ten Principles are: Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-Reliance, Radical Self-Expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leaving No Trace, Participation, and Immediacy. I have included the full definitions of these principles in Appendix A. These principles, to some degree, place an onus on participants to both accept and engage with one another. Although they do not outwardly prescribe specific activities for participants, they espouse an ethos of openness, personal challenge, and interpersonal engagement that colors interactions in the festival zone. The principles of radical inclusion, civic responsibility, communal effort, and participation, for instance, clearly emphasize social interaction and collective creation as central components of a Burn. They encourage participants to experience one another, rather than simply take in aesthetic or sensorial pleasures. Just because Burns explicitly outline the Ten Principles, there is no guarantee that participants will necessarily follow them. Furthermore, there is some variety in the interpretation of the Ten Principles across regional Burns. For example, Euphoria‘s website defines the principle of ―decommodification‖ thusly: ―Hand in hand with gifting, burns are environments with no commercial transactions or advertising. Nothing is for sale—we participate rather than consume.‖107 The official Burning Man principle, however, reads: ―In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.‖108 Notably, the Euphoria definition omits both the philosophical underpinnings of the principle and the defensive posturing vis-à-vis forces of ―exploitation.‖ It reads strictly as a rule—rather than a principle—and lacks any expression of alterity from everyday life. A number of other principles were similarly shorthanded in Euphoria‘s list of the Ten Principles (Figure 2.2). Unlike Scorched Nuts and Burning Man, the rules of which clearly emphasize participants‘ ethical responsibilities in the festival space, Euphoria‘s principles characterize the festival as less a site for utopian social practice than as a place for personal frivolity within the confines of a few rules. While the Ten Principles are not the sole determinant of how participants behave at the Burn, a number of participants remarked that Euphoria felt less inclusive and social than other

107 ―10 Principles,‖ Euphoria official website, accessed January 24, 2012, http://www.euphoriaburn.com/10- principles. 108 ―Ten Principles,‖ Burning Man official website. 38

Burns they‘d attended. Steven Bennett, a first-timer, called Euphoria ―a shallow experience,‖ noting that many of the people he interacted with were simply not interested in meeting other people. Veteran Kate Harrison, who attended Scorched Nuts as well, characterized Euphoria as ―a lot of people walking around and keeping to their own group. It wasn‘t as inclusive [as Scorched Nuts].‖109 Although we should not attribute these perceptions of Euphoria solely to the expression of its rules and regulations, the alternative set of Ten Principles certainly seems to me a contributing factor because it characterizes the event (especially to first-time participants) as less of a community-based experience than a loosely regulated celebration. The enforcement of rules at Burns reflects the events‘ alterity from everyday life by emphasizing communal practices and togetherness, rather than discipline and punishment. Although there is no official police presence at the festivals, rules are still enforced by volunteers working as ―Rangers.‖ These volunteers patrol the festival grounds over several-hour shifts looking to avert destructive or anti-social behavior, or assisting participants in need. Common duties include defusing disputes, preventing irresponsible use of fire, administering first aid, and monitoring adverse reactions to drug or alcohol intake. There is also a heavy social aspect to the job—a reason why many participants volunteer. Rangers travel about the entire campgrounds, introducing themselves to other festivalgoers and spending a brief period of time with different groups before moving on. In gratitude for the volunteering, participants often offer a visiting Ranger a beer or puff from a joint—though Rangers are expected to maintain a relatively clear head during their shift. Such a relaxed style of law enforcement clearly contrasts with that of the quotidian world. At a Burn, organizers make every effort to prevent police entrance to the festival—they are generally called only for serious drug overdoses or other threats to life110—and to instead handle incidents through friendly facilitations whenever possible. Rule enforcement exemplifies an alternative practice of a major (often controversial) social institution encountered in everyday life; to many festival participants, the Ranger system seems more friendly and just than the police. While it may seem highly impractical in the outside world, Burns‘ rule enforcement structures constitute performances of an imagined utopia in which order is

109 I should note that it is unlikely veteran burners would look at Euphoria‘s list of Ten Principles since they would already be familiar with the official version. Euphoria‘s Ten Principles would have the most significant impact on first-timers. Kate Harrison and Rafi Gomes, interview by Bryan Schmidt, taped interview, November 12, 2011. 110 No police were called during Scorched Nuts or Euphoria in 2011; police were called at the 2011 Afterburn to respond to a participant‘s drug overdose. This, however, was the last resort; it was only after several hours, when organizers were sure the participant‘s condition (though not immediately life threatening) was serious and not improving that the call was made. 39 maintained through friendly community volunteers, rather than officers empowered by the state. This creates the impression of the Burn as a safe space and a self-regulating community, helping to foster the trust and openness necessary for communitas to develop. The rules and enforcement of a festival do not necessarily prescribe the activities that will occur there; just as in everyday life, people may be unaware of rules, choose to ignore them, or interpret them differently. Yet each festival‘s tenets amount to an explicit expression of its organizers‘ objectives and values, and of the festival‘s alterity from daily life. Burning Man‘s Ten Principles thematically evoke the process of socialization and human togetherness while simultaneously outlining alternative systems of socialization and economy (through the outlawing of monetary exchange and instituting ―gifting‖ and barter systems) that oppose the overarching capitalist system. This, as well as the establishment of enforcement principles which utilize friendly and minimally invasive procedures, create a dramaturgy of utopia potentially communicated to all incoming participants. Entry Procedures

1. Euphoria (noun)—A feeling or state of intense excitement and happiness. - Dictionary 2. There‘s a difference between me and the rest of the world! Happiness isn‘t good enough for me! I demand euphoria! - Bill Watterson 3. A community is like a ship. Everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm. – Henrik Ibsen.

4. 5. Sometimes the questions are more important than the answers. - Nancy Willard 6. You must live in the present. Launch yourself on every wave. Find your externity in each moment. – Henry David Thoreau 7. Being happy doesn‘t mean that everything is perfect, it means you‘ve decided to look beyond the imperfections. - Quote unknown 8. I have a different constitution. I have a different brain. I have a different heart. I got tiger‘s blood, man. - Charlie Sheen 9. Have a good burn!

The above quotes were listed on signs planted by festival staff lining a dirt road between the entrance gate of Euphoria and the festival‘s actual camping grounds. Taken together, they project an air of spiritual enlightenment combined with unbridled enthusiasm and pop culture savvy. Their positioning along a road on which all participants must travel shows an intention to impact the festival populace by creating an atmosphere of the extraordinary and suggested cheerfulness in the festival space. Passing signs served as the last of a series of welcoming rites and entry procedures that ushered participants from the quotidian world into the liminoid realm of the Burn. The process of entering Burns is critical, especially for first-time burners, for

40 establishing a dramaturgy in the space, instilling in participants each festival‘s rules and ethos, and promoting festive socialization. The entrance procedures for Scorched Nuts and Euphoria differ markedly from one another as well as from the heavily regulated perimeters and entranceways of Burning Man proper.111 These differences begin with the very process of reaching each entrance. Euphoria‘s gate lies fairly close to a widely used road near LaFayette, Georgia, and is clearly marked for visitors‘ ease of entrance. In contrast, to reach Scorched Nuts, one must travel down a series of dirt roads for about five miles before reaching an entrance in the woods marked only by a small wooden sign with a fire insignia on it; it would be easy to get lost, particularly if one arrived at night. The festival felt much more hidden, remote, and natural, compared to Euphoria, where the outside world was never very far away. The trip to Scorched Nuts more forcefully dislocated participants from urbanity and market culture than the trip to Euphoria. Neither festival, however, required a journey so lengthy (for its targeted, local constituency), perilous, and removed from civilization as does Burning Man. Despite the fact that regional Burns‘ survival guides place significant emphasis on the Burning Man principle of ―radical self-reliance,‖ participants can be comforted that should trouble befall them en route to or from the event, they will not be stranded in a particularly harsh environment. Thus, regional Burns seem distanced from the everyday world, yet remain relatively safe, helping to create a comfortable environment in which interpersonal trust can be cultivated. Scorched Nuts and Euphoria each erected a gate or entranceway for participants to pass through before reaching the festival grounds and setting up their campsite. This gate served the practical purposes of preventing entrance to unticketed patrons, allowing the festival staff to distribute standard liability waivers to all attendees, and screening for prohibited materials such as fireworks and firearms.112 The gate also served the aesthetic purposes of inscribing a generally uniform dramaturgy to incoming participants, as well as symbolically closing off the festival

111 Burning Man has an entire department devoted to policing the gate and perimeter of Black Rock City. A quote from their website reads: ―Your eyes strain, then relax. Out of the darkness emerges first one light, then another. A voice [echoes] out of the radio, ‗Have you got a 20 on that? They are trying to sneak in via the back road.‘ You replay into the radio that you‘ve got a good visual. The two of you jump back into the cab of the truck and drive out to investigate the shimmering lights on the horizon.‖ The quote points to the degree of technical sophistication and seriousness the festival devotes to policing this perimeter. The lengths to which Burning Man goes to prevent unticketed patrons from entering the festival illustrates the increasing exclusivity of that festival, as well as its highly regulated and structured nature. ―Gate Perimeter & Exodus,‖ Burning Man official website, accessed January 3, 2012, http://gate.burningman.com. 112 Euphoria‘s survival guide does, however, invite fire cannons, flamethrowers, fire art, and installations. 41 space from the outside world. To this end, each festival employed distinct ritualistic procedures at their entrance: Scorched Nuts‘s gate consisted only of a small check-in station (a lean-to tent covering a picnic table and a few fold-up chairs) in the middle of the giant field in which the festival took place. My field notes about the Scorched Nuts gate read as follows: I pulled up to the gate […] at about 3pm, and was greeted by several volunteers sipping beer at a picnic table. I was asked to present my ticket and then to fill out a brief survey and release form. They told me they would need to inspect my car, unless I wanted to ―bribe the gate.‖ Taking the hint, I offered them all a few beers that I had brought with me, which they seemed very grateful for and waived the inspection. They read my questionnaire aloud, poking fun at my answers, and acknowledging important aspects. ―This is your first Burn?!‖ one person asked. When I told them it was, he came to me with a big hug and said, ―Welcome home!‖ Then, I was asked to pick a number between one and twenty. I chose thirteen, and a volunteer came up to me with a switch and playfully slapped me on the rear thirteen times. Finally, the volunteers gave me leave to park anywhere on the grounds, noting that one area was generally quieter than the rest.113 All-told, the entire process took about fifteen minutes, yet imparted quite a bit of dramaturgical information about the event—most notably its laid-back nature. The explicit option to ―bribe the gate‖ characterized the festival‘s lack of stringent control over its participants‘ activities, and even without a bribe, volunteers only looked through a car with minimal thoroughness.114 The bribe—which is really more of a gift, since one doesn‘t actually receive anything of value in return—existed more as an effort to begin festivalgoers practicing the Ten Principles (―Gifting‖ being the operative one here) and encourage communal exchange. This communality was also expressed through touch, both with the hug from the volunteer, and the subsequent switching. It served to both physically and emotionally prepare participants for close bodily contact with others throughout the weekend, and also symbolically elicited the concept of interpersonal communion and the carnivalesque.

113 Bryan Schmidt, field notes for Scorched Nuts, Rutland, OH, June 9-12, 2011. 114 I discovered this when I volunteered for a shift working at the gate the next day. The laxness of the gate struck me as particularly interesting since just before Scorched Nuts I had attended the Summer Camp Music Festival where our car was turned over to and inspected by police dogs upon entrance to the grounds. 42

While Scorched Nuts‘s entrance procedures communicated a relaxed, tranquil atmosphere on the festival grounds, Euphoria‘s gate activities were much more structured. I suspect that this difference resulted at least partially from the festivals‘ respective sizes; Scorched Nuts, a festival of 117 participants, allowed a playful and informal execution while Euphoria, a larger festival including over 650 participants, suggested a more serious, procedural atmosphere. At Euphoria‘s entranceway, organizers created a literal gate to block the only roadway leading in the festival grounds. A small building near this gate was used for the participant check-in and entrance procedures. This gave Euphoria, from the onset, a more officious air than Scorched Nuts, and made the entrance process itself feel more technical. When I arrived, there was a small line of cars waiting to get into the festival, so organizers moved through the entry procedures quickly and efficiently. Upon pulling up to the gate, presenting my ticket, and filling out a brief survey with emergency contact information and a liability waiver, I was asked to name the ten principles of Burning Man. I could not remember all of them and so was told to spin a roulette wheel that would land on an insignia for one of the principles. The volunteers then explained this rule to me, and painted the insignia on my hand for me to wear during the festival. This episode shows how Euphoria‘s gate entrance procedures overtly inscribed festival rules upon participants. Many first time Burners did not know, or had only a passing understanding of these principles, and so the gate offered an opportunity for festival staff to impart this necessary knowledge to each participant and bring them into the fold, so to speak. The drawing of the insignia on participants‘ hands, creating visual reminders of the principles to be seen by all present, illustrates the more regimented imparting of key dramaturgical information at Euphoria than at Scorched Nuts.115 Next, I was told to ring a bell (thus heralding my arrival), and was given a sharp slap on the butt from a staff member before finally being allowed through the gate leading to the campgrounds. Unlike Scorched Nuts, Euphoria regulated the use of automobiles in their space— one could not have a vehicle on the grounds unless it was decorated in a unique style and thus contributed to the madcap aesthetics of the heightened theatrical zone. I had not decorated my car, so I was given a time limit (marked on the windshield with washable paint) to reach my

115 Though I initially saw this practice as a public shaming of sorts, I soon realized that nearly everyone at the festival could be seen wearing an insignia. In fact, I found that comparing insignias with strangers made for a good icebreaker, which may have been a reason behind implementing this entrance procedure in the first place. Perhaps it was in part intended as a way to give participants a common subject to begin communicating with one another. 43 destination.116 Finally, I was allowed entrance to travel to my campsite. All of these procedures, I should note, were administered with good humor and a welcoming attitude. Still, the technicality of these procedures characterized Euphoria from the onset as more structured and closely controlled than Scorched Nuts. I found the act of ceremonial spanking, which all participants underwent during both festivals‘ entrance procedures, quite significant. Perhaps suggestive of the now-abandoned technique of spanking newborn babies to get them to breathe, the act helps symbolically separate participants from their daily lives so as to enter the world of the Burn. Along with uttering ―welcome home‖ (which creates a reversal establishing domicile in the public festival space, rather than one‘s own private residence) and the traditional assumption of an alternative ―Burn name‖ for use during the event, participants sever ties to the structural world and are ―reborn‖ into the liminoid realm. Secondly, the spanking inserted an element of the carnivalesque into the festival atmosphere from the onset. Spanking often carries sexual connotations, and its employment at a festival where nudity and open sexuality is common seemed to promote libidinal energy on the festival premises. Finally, enduring the spank acted as a declaration of trust by the participant; by undergoing what, from a stranger, many would consider an invasive act, the participant expresses (or appears to express) her openness to witnessing activities that may be unusual or unfamiliar to her. The Burning Man principle of ―Radical Self-Expression‖ assures that much of the art and activity present will be outside many participants‘ comfort zones. Yet all are expected to be accepting of this self-expression so long as it does not affect their own well-being. As one participant put it: ―[You] have to be non-judgmental and somewhat open to get the full experience.‖117 The tradition of spanking, therefore, is intended to open participants up to intersubjective exchange by promoting tolerance and even acceptance of activities different from one‘s norm.118

116 After participants unloaded their vehicles and set up camp, they then parked in a lot area—a large clearing near the festival entranceway. 117 Questionnaire #013, sent to the author on August 20, 2011. 118 It is important to note the coercive and potentially problematic nature of this tradition. While both Euphoria and Scorched Nuts maintain a strict ―No Means No‖ policy regarding sexual conduct at the events, the spanking at the entrance often happens without consulting participants. A companion of mine, for instance, was shocked and outraged when she was struck without being consulted or warned by a gate volunteer. Furthermore, because one assumes that all participants endured the tradition, it also potentially creates an impression that anyone present is sexually available. This is a worrisome premise at a festival in which nudity is often present—indeed a problem articulated by many burners is the degree to which leering occurs. 44

What should be clear about these entrance procedures is that, particularly for first-time participants, they create an initial impression about the festival‘s populace, the types of activity encouraged, and how the space differs from the outside world. Scorched Nuts‘s relatively lax entrance procedures suggest that the festival is a release from the laws and stresses of the normal world, emphasizing connection to nature as well as interpersonal exchange. Euphoria‘s more regimented procedures similarly encourage this exchange, although with a greater emphasis on rules and a more tightly articulated dramaturgy. In both cases, the entry procedures act as performatives, inaugurating the festival space for the participant, distinguishing it from the outside world, and layering symbolic significance on top of it. Through intimate touch (the hug as well as the spank), they establish a carnivalesque atmosphere and emphasize friendly, familiar relationships with fellow burners—crucial first steps in creating the trust necessary for communitas to arise. The Effigy For both Scorched Nuts and Euphoria, the effigy was erected in a central area of the campgrounds, clearly visible to all participants as they entered the space. Contrary to the official Burning Man festival, regional Burn effigies are generally built either by festival organizers themselves, or by participant-artists who receive grant money for the project from the festival coffers. The effigies of both Scorched Nuts and Euphoria were diminutive compared to the massive structures built annually for Burning Man; they rose only about fifteen feet in the air compared with the Big Burn‘s seventy-five to one hundred foot-high structures. They also lacked similar visual panache; Scorched Nuts‘s effigy was no more than a tall, wooden platform without any extraneous decoration. Euphoria featured a slightly more ostentatious structure (see Figure 2.1), but it also cost comparatively little. In neither Euphoria nor Scorched Nuts did the effigy resemble or feature a humanoid figure; their continued use of the label ―effigy‖ seems to be an homage to Burning Man‘s central piece (the Man itself) as the progenitor of burner culture, as well as a convenient shorthand for ―the thing we burn.‖ The name also suggests the sculpture‘s usage as a symbolic force. However, the effigies‘ meanings (like that of the Man) appear to be left intentionally vague and remain open to individual interpretation. Each effigy acquired symbolic value to the community by being made available to festival participants for certain uses. Colorful markers were attached to the Scorched Nuts effigy for participants to leave thoughts or messages on the wood that would eventually be burned.

These messages multiplied over the course of the weekend, generating an amalgam of significations that suggested myriad participant interpretations of the sculpture‘s significance. Messages included prayers, words of wisdom, famous quotes, jokes, drawings, and more. Wry comments elicited responses, which in turn elicited more discourse until multi-party conversations took up entire swaths of the structure‘s surface area. These inscriptions turned the effigy, initially constructed by a member of the event staff, into a collective creation by the festival participants. In some sense, it documented the experience of the weekend by recording the figurative footprints of participants. Euphoria‘s effigy did not have means to write upon it (although some participants chose to with utensils they brought), yet participant interactions with the structure still similarly morphed it into a collective creation that physically represented the festival experience. On the first night of Euphoria, the effigy served as an open bar for any and all present. Organizers supplied a stock of beer, liquor, and mixers, and volunteers staffed the structure throughout the evening. Many participants climbed up through the chimney to walk around on top of the effigy, where one could both see much of the campground and be seen by those nearby. These activities made the effigy a site for congregation, where one could socialize with friends as well as strangers. By the time participants burned it the subsequent evening, the memory of this gathering and the social energy it generated was effectively imbued in the structure in a way that parallels the written remarks on the Scorched Nuts effigy.119 Although festival staffs physically constructed both the Scorched Nuts and Euphoria effigies, over the course of the weekend the sculptures came to stand as symbols of collective identity-making. By interacting with and around these sculptures, each participant added levels of signification to her or his own perception of the object, as well as the public‘s perception. When the entire populace finally gathered to burn the effigy, their collective energy focused onto this single beacon. The effigies stood as visual documents of the weekend‘s festivities; by burning the buildings at the end of the festival, participants symbolically send up these memories to the heavens, consecrating and solemnizing the festival‘s activities as well as setting them apart so they can‘t be changed by the structural world. Just as Peggy Phelan has claimed that ―performance‘s being becomes itself through disappearance,‖ the burning of the effigy

119 Scorched Nuts‘s effigy also had social uses. Despite its bare-bones nature, as one of few solid-roofed structures at the Burn, it proved useful for avoiding rain showers or dodging the sun during the peak day hours. Individuals often congregated there over the course of the weekend. 46 documenting the weekend proves an apt metaphor to characterize the Burn as having the same ephemerality as theatrical performance.120

Figure 2.1: Euphoria’s Effigy Pictured here is Euphoria’s effigy as it begins to burn. Vaguely visible are a number of participants cheering in the background. You can see the large stacks of wood placed inside the building to make the burn more intense. (Picture provided with permission by Joe Hunt)

120 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, (New York: Routledge, 1993), 146. 47

Fire in the Sky: The Conclave and Effigy Burning The consecration process begins on the final night of the Burn with the ceremonial pre- burning Fire Conclave. This ceremony dates back to the 1991 Burning Man festival, originally established as simply ―an opportunity to dance at the foot of the [effigy].‖121 Early Conclave performances at Burning Man were improvised exhibitions of fire dancing and spinning just before organizers set the Man ablaze. By 2005, it had evolved into a massive, coordinated fire performance event, complete with hundreds of participants, a formalized leadership organization, auditions, and a stated mandate to ―cultivate a higher level of skill and performance artistry.‖122 Regional Burn Conclaves differ vastly from Burning Man‘s current immense, prearranged form, more closely resembling the loosely organized style of the Burning Man Conclave‘s pre- Millennial iterations. The Scorched Nuts and Euphoria Conclaves, for example, utilized minimal organization and involved only ten to twenty participants who volunteered a day or two before the ceremony. Wendy Clupper describes the dichotomy between current Burning Man and regional Burn Conclaves: ―At the regionals, it‘s a lot more free-form […]. They might do something that‘s synchronized; they might not […]. There‘s not as much pressure. The scale is smaller; the number of choreographed fire implements is a lot less than you‘re going to see at Burning Man. Burning Man is the pinnacle. People rehearse year-round to show their stuff there. It‘s the ‗Apollo.‘‖123 Clupper characterizes regional Burn Conclaves as less spectacular than Burning Man‘s, but also less rigidly structured, allowing for alteration based on the unique population of the event. Since neither Scorched Nuts nor Euphoria had formal requirements for taking part (other than a very minimal screening to be sure participants could safely handle the object they wished to spin in front of an audience), first-time fire performers participated in both ceremonies—something that could not happen at today‘s Burning Man. While some members of Scorched Nuts and Euphoria were members of organized fire-spinning groups, neither festival‘s Conclave involved choreographed group performances. Rather, individual spinners or tandems performed improvised routines for about five minutes per person while walking in a simple, circumscribing pattern around the effigy.124 Both Euphoria and Scorched Nuts held informal

121 ―Fire Conclave,‖ Burning Man official website, accessed April 13, 2012, http://www.burningman.com/participate/fire_conclave.html. 122 Ibid. 123 Wendy Clupper, interview by Bryan Schmidt, phone interview, November 2, 2011. 124 The length of each routine can be controlled by the length of time each spinner soaks their apparatus in kerosene prior to beginning the routine. 48 meetings about the fire Conclave during the events (information on which was circulated by word-of-mouth), and from these a general performance outline was arranged and an order of spinning determined. When the time for the Scorched Nuts Conclave approached, the participating individuals gathered into a single group while the rest of the festivalgoers distributed themselves in a circle around the effigy. Surrounding sound camps turned off all music so that the only noise was the chatter from around the circle. This calm marked the beginning of the Conclave, focusing festivalgoers‘ attention on the events at hand. Out of the silence, a number of participants began beating on bongo drums, providing a beat for fire spinners to move to during the ceremony. My field notes on the Scorched Nuts Conclave read: From the darkness, an appointed person ignited the ends of a participant‘s staff, and he walked into the space just surrounding the effigy, spinning along with the techno music that played. The audience began to cheer immediately as he began his routine, but soon quieted down so the spinner could hear the music. The spinner slowly inched his way around the [the effigy]; when he had walked about a quarter of the way around the effigy a second spinner ignited his object—this time poi. There were no more than three spinners at one time and a total of ten performers in all. For the most part the crowd was silent, save for some cheering when each new spinner entered the space, or when an extremely difficult maneuver was achieved. The mood was solemn but anticipatory. When spinners‘ flames finally expired, some exited the circle to join the crowd while others went back in line and prepared for another pass using a different apparatus. Towards the end of the ceremony, two of these repeat performers spun together using staffs with candelabras on each end—this was the most technically intricate of all the fire performances. Yet the one that most moved the crowd was the final performance: a flaming whip. With each crack of the whip, a fire ball lashed out, and spectators cheered loudly.125 What stands out to me now, although I didn‘t record it in my field notes, is the Conclave‘s combination of primitivistic ceremonial activities (i.e. the drumming and the ritual encircling of the effigy) with a futuro-technological atmosphere created by the costuming of onlookers (which

125 Bryan Schmidt, field notes for Scorched Nuts, Rutland, OH, June 9-12, 2011. 49 included glow sticks and neon lights). These elements, along with the visceral, mythic, and hypnotic power of the fire gave the ceremony an almost magical quality, sanctifying the effigy with a degree of spiritual magnificence. Kate Harrison, who spun during the Scorched Nuts and Euphoria Conclaves, noted: ―During the Conclave, you don‘t want to mess up at all […]. There‘s a lot more pressure to be sharp, to be on top of your game.‖126 This pressure indicates the event‘s seriousness to the burner community—I also noticed onlookers shushing those who talked during the fire performances. This seriousness shows the ritualistic, almost holy atmosphere of the Conclave. By circumscribing the space around the effigy the fire performers hallow that space in the same way a priest might say a blessing before an altar. The fire performances, inherently dangerous to performers and, to some extent, the audience, heighten the intensity of the scene in the moments leading up to the actual effigy burning. It thus gathers communal energy into the space in preparation for an ecstatic release as the effigy goes up in flames. After the Scorched Nuts and Euphoria Conclaves ended spinners rejoined the circle of people surrounding the effigy, equals again with the participants that previously cheered them. There were a few moments of inactivity; then a participant carrying a torch entered the ring (along with a fire marshal)127 to finally set the effigy ablaze—cheers began to well up from the crowd, reaching their zenith when the fire was in full force and lasting for several minutes. Organizers at both Scorched Nuts and Euphoria took great care to control the blaze in a safe and aesthetically pleasing way. They each readied their effigies to be ignited by packing them with tinder and dousing them with gasoline, so that when lit, the entire structure was consumed in flames instantly. At Euphoria, the effigy was designed to burn in a unique and beautiful way: upon its lighting, flames shot up through the structure‘s ―chimney‖ to make a fire streak in the night sky; the leaf-like flaps, attached to the chimney with rope, fell down one by one, eliciting a cheer from the crowd each time. As both festivals‘ effigies burned, ash billowed into the air, still glowing, and dropped like rain on the participants. At Euphoria and Scorched Nuts, organizers took measures to prevent participants from rushing the structure while it was still in danger of collapsing and potentially injuring

126 Kate Harrison, interview by Bryan Schmidt, recorded interview, November 12, 2011. 127 To comply with laws regarding controlled burns, all effigy burnings must have a credentialed fire marshal on hand. Some Burns (including the 2011 Afterburn) have qualified participants fulfill this role, and this seems to be the preferred choice in order to preserve the festival‘s complete segregation from the outside world. However, at both Scorched Nuts and Euphoria, the fire marshal was an outsider. To me, he presented a very distracting regulatory presence during what constituted the Burns‘ moment of greatest collective revelry. 50 participants: Scorched Nuts used a clothes line to mark off a safe distance, while Euphoria engaged a set of participants to face the crowd (with their backs towards the flaming effigy) and scan for dangerous behavior. When the effigies finally collapsed, the fire marshal gave permission for participants to approach the flames; at this official release, everyone rushed towards the fire and proceeded to carouse around the rubble. This began a revelry phase that extended throughout the evening. Participants, energized by the performance, the crowd‘s excitement, and the visceral power of the flames, now dispersed to all areas of the camping grounds to take part in the evening‘s festivities. While the imagery utilized in both Euphoria and Scorched Nuts‘ effigy burnings and Conclaves was generally vague, the ritualistic process generated energy amongst the festival populace that was released when the effigy finally went up in flames. The Conclaves created dramaturgies of sanctification through ritualistic performances to which all present contributed. Although the fire spinners played a key role in the ritual, when they returned to the general circle after their performance, all participants were equal. Because the effigies contained both the physical markings and invisible memories of the populace, the Conclave and burning of the effigy amounted to a communal hallowing of the community itself. This made the evening‘s subsequent partying and socializing feel particularly exceptional. Conclusions Burns‘ official activities form a loose structure for the weekend‘s events with the Conclave and effigy burning signifying their climax. These activities create parameters to describe the unique imagined community that arises in the festival space based on perceived unities in ethos and expressive practice. Many participants (veteran burners in particular) thus enter Burns prepared to encounter like-minded individuals because those who attend self-select to do so based upon the common dramaturgy articulated in promotional materials, especially the Ten Principles. This makes it much easier for intersubjective experiences to occur during the festival‘s unofficial activities because it erodes emotional distance between subjects. Burns‘ official activities encourage social encounters and attach significant symbolic meaning to them. Participants engage with one another with an assumption—based on the Ten Principles‘ vaguely political rhetoric—that such unmediated interactions are transgressive vis-à- vis mainstream society. The insertion of carnivalesque activities (i.e. the playful spanking or whipping at the entrance gate) into the entry procedures of Scorched Nuts and Euphoria also

51 fosters communality by creating a dramaturgy that signifies common transgression. Although the Conclave and effigy burning do not come until the end of the festival, anticipation of their spiritually potent affirmation of the weekend‘s events adds gravity to person-to-person interactions. I have in this chapter attempted to articulate the role official activities in Scorched Nuts and Euphoria play in both facilitating the emergence of deep community and creating overarching atmospheres for both festivals. Such activities are necessary to establish the communal trust and experiential commonalities necessary for communitas to arise, acting as a general structure around which the innumerable unofficial activities of a Burn occur, and through which achieve significance. However, official activities neither constitute nor automatically enable communitas. Because all participants experience the festival‘s official activities, the events are generally impersonal, unchanging, and mediated by an enacting authority. Conversely, as I discuss in the next chapter, unofficial activities are extremely personal since participants enact them themselves; they have the flexibility for change when new people become involved, and thus more clearly enable immediate, intersubjective experiences.

CHAPTER THREE FROM PEAK EXPERIENCE TO COMMUNITY EMERGENCE: UNOFFICIAL ACTIVITES AT SCORCHED NUTS Introduction ―All real living is meeting‖ - Martin Buber, I and Thou128 While the previous chapter discussed the importance of Burns‘ official activities to establishing a degree of trust between festival participants and a heightened aesthetic milieu on the festival grounds, here I argue that during the unofficial activities—social events initiated by participants as opposed to organizers, and which do not involve the entirety of the festival‘s populace—spur the potential for communitas and intersubjectivity. Although official activities physically and emotionally engage large groups of people together, they necessarily stifle personal expression and individuality because organizational authorities (festival organizers or Black Rock City LLC) impose prescribed actions during these events that mediate interpersonal interactions. Official activities establish commonalities between participants based not on deep, unmediated connections, but rather, on an imagined group identity. Unofficial activities allow participants a greater degree of agency, and are usually enacted amongst small groups of people.129 This lack of direct mediation by an authority allows for the creation of more intimate connections and the exploration of more creative possibilities, both critical to generating anti- structural communitas. Unofficial activities—at least those with a clear performance or play element to them— are primarily social; they are also often intense experiences that place participants‘ bodies in dynamic motion alongside one another or include extreme sensorial experiences. This corresponds with Fischer-Lichte‘s assertion that ―dynamic and energetic bodies moving through [a] whole space‖ may lead to the formation of a temporary community in a theatrical setting.

128 Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. by Ronald Gregor Smith, (New York: Scribner, 1958), 25. 129 I say generally because there are rare occasions where an informal activity may come to involve most, if not all festival participants. One example would be at Afterburn, where a touring group of artists constructed an elaborate, human-sized version of the Mousetrap board game and created a performance around it. The performance was attended by what seemed to be practically all members of the festival. Because participants, rather than organizers, created the event, I would consider it an example of an unofficial activity. 53

Fischer-Lichte paints a portrait of frenetic performances in Max Reinhardt‘s Theatre of the Five Thousand, where the audience came together by physically engaging in the space as actors spilled out into the audience and ―jostled up‖ against spectators, or as patrons craned their necks around to see all of those in the space. The movement of actors throughout the audience created a situation where spectators constantly physically engaged with the phenomenological bodies moving around them, which created an unmediated connection between subjects that allowed for community to develop. The case studies I examine in this chapter similarly depict events in which participants engage with one another in a physical manner during the charged moments of an intense or aesthetic encounter. I believe such encounters to have a heightened affective potentiality, and may break down barriers and allow intersubjectivity to arise. Because the unofficial activities at Burns are innumerable, this chapter examines case studies from Scorched Nuts chosen for variety, for being common activities that seem to occur in slightly different fashions across multiple Burns (as I perceived them and attempted to verify through my surveys and interviews), and for their ability to illustrate the idea of a performance or play activity creating an immediate, deep connection between individuals. The first section discusses object manipulation and fire performance, activities synonymous with Burns. My analysis of this play activity will show how such performances create a deep connection between individuals by engaging them in an immediate, visceral experience in which participants perceive one another‘s phenomenological bodies. I will also describe how informal fire performance differs from formal Conclave fire performances. The second part of this chapter discusses a storm at Scorched Nuts in order to describe the importance of environmental factors—an integral part of the lived-in festival experience—in coloring the performances and social scenarios that take place at Burns. Finally, I discuss a participant-created structure—a trampoline with a geodesic dome attached to the top of it130—and the varied, collective, creative activities enacted by participants in and around it to exemplify the way playful explorations of material in the festival environment may lead to communitas.

130 This is a bit difficult to visualize and unfortunately no photo is available, so I will here describe the structure in a little more detail: A geodesic dome is an approximation of a hollow spherical structure, the skeleton of which is made up of dozens of small triangles. In the case of this particular structure, individual aluminum bars formed these triangles. The dome, with a radius of about seven feet, was constructed on top of a trampoline of the same size. This effectively enabled participants to scale the dome—climbing up the metal bars like on a jungle gym—and then drop through the middle when they reached the top in order to experience a mega-bounce on the trampoline. 54

Although spontaneous communitas is fleeting and often difficult to pin down and examine concretely, Turner lists a number of attributes that tend to accompany it: equality, absence of status, nakedness, humility, disregard for personal appearance, no distinctions of wealth, unselfishness, sacredness, sacred instruction, silence, foolishness, simplicity, acceptance of pain and suffering, heteronomy.131 While my previous chapter has shown a number of these attributes to be themes dramaturgically coded into Burns generally (nakedness, sacredness, and heteronomy, for example), here I look for these attributes in the actual physical practices of the unofficial activities I discuss as evidence for communitas arising. Fire and Flow: Object Manipulation in Performance and Play No activities are more synonymous with Burn culture than fire spinning and object manipulation. Object manipulation refers to any form of dexterity play or performance in which a person attempts to deftly choreograph difficult tricks and movements involving inanimate items. Fire spinning is a form of object manipulation in which the object is soaked in fuel and lit during the routine; burners generally consider fire spinning to be a higher level of object manipulation because of its difficulty and danger. Popular apparatuses—―toys‖ in burner parlance—include poi, staffs, hula hoops, batons, rope darts, glow sticks, and ―magic wands.‖132 While fire performance almost exclusively happens in the evening, when the light given off by the fire is more noticeable, it is common to see object manipulation at nearly any time during a Burn, whether in practice or theatrical display. Sean, an Afterburn participant, noted in an interview that nearly everyone who comes to a Burn eventually tries object manipulation. He explained the popularity of such performance in this way: I think it comes from being around so many people making it look easy. I think it comes from the sense in which even if you‘re able to do just one simple thing with [the object], it coaxes you into [a] meditative state. It also teaches you an instant lesson about self and other, and expectation versus what you get back. Because you say, ‗Oh yeah, I see what he‘s doing!‘ and you try make your body

131 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process, 106. 132 A ―magic wand‖ is a small stick attached to very thin strings, which are manipulated by the user in order to make it appear as if the wand is floating mid-air. Referring to such objects as ―toys‖ highlights the inherent play aspect of this performance style. It is both an art and a game. 55

do it and you realize there‘s a huge difference. And you want to figure that out more.133 This explanation articulates object manipulation as a complex combination of social, spiritual, and mimetic impulses. The theatricality and kineticism of fire performance mark it as a peak activity around which grows a social subculture.

Figure 3.1: A Participant in the Middle of a Fire Spinning Routine at Scorched Nuts Picture provided with permission from Greta Powers.

Informal fire spinning differs from spinning in the Conclave in a number of important ways. While it sometimes takes place in a framed staging area,134 just as often (if not more so) it

133 Sean, Interview by Bryan Schmidt, taped interview, November 12, 2011. 56 arises organically wherever adequate space can be found. There is no set order participants must follow, although, in smaller groupings there is generally an unspoken code to wait to light up until the previous performer nears the end of her routine.135 Unlike the Fire Conclave, where the ceremonial procedures dictate that participants must slowly walk around the effigy while spinning, performers generally stay planted in one small area during informal fire performance, twisting their bodies to create variations in their movements. As articulated by Scorched Nuts and Euphoria participant Rafi Gomes, a poi spinner, the technical requirements of the Conclave ceremony prevent fire performers from displaying their full potential: ―In Conclave, you usually don‘t get to do your best moves, because you‘re walking, and there‘s a ton of other people around you. There‘s pressure to keep your eye on everything, keep an idea of where people are, and keep a smile on your face. You are the show piece for right now.‖136 Gomes describes the Conclave as a ―show‖ for which participants sacrifice technical finesse in order to deliver a ―smile,‖ an appearance of confidence or satisfaction that may not necessarily correspond to the spinner‘s actual level of accomplishment.137 Informal performances have fewer distractions and lack the ceremonial scripting of the fire Conclave. This allows spinners to showcase their most technically difficult maneuvers, opening up the option of failure and experimentation rather than the seeming perfection the Conclave requires. In fire performance, as with many other performing arts, performers attempt to reach their highest level of virtuosity not in the high-stakes scenarios of greatest public exposure, but in more private sessions or practice. Another important element that relates to this peculiarity and which differentiates informal fire performance from the Conclave is the audience. Most Conclave spectators are not themselves fire spinners; in contrast, other fire performers often make up the audience for

134 ―The Circus,‖ a theme camp at Euphoria, marked off a fifteen square-yard clearing as a space for fire performances by flanking it with large torches. These torches served to bound the staging area, illuminate fire performances, and serve as an ignition source for performers to light their objects. 135 One can tell that the routine is coming to an end because the flames on the object begin to dim. When this happens, spinners will often attempt to spin the object extremely quickly so as to extinguish the flames themselves, rather than wait for them to dwindle (since that would make for a rather unexciting conclusion). 136 Kate Harrison and Rafi Gomes, Interview by Bryan Schmidt, taped interview, November 12, 2011. 137 Gomes does not, I think, mean that fire spinners must literally try to keep a smile on their faces at all times during the Conclave, but rather, that they must attempt to create a routine that looks beautiful and leaves little room for making a serious mistake (i.e. dropping a poi or visibly burning oneself) that might disturb the solemn atmosphere of the ceremony. 57 informal spinning, acting as spotters in addition to spectators.138 Often, a circle of spinners may be made up entirely of spectator-performers, where everyone involved takes a turn spinning and then steps back to watch the other performers. Gomes describes the difference between performing for a large crowd and performing amongst other fire artists: ―I‘m much more comfortable spinning around other spinners. I also feel like I‘m much more judged spinning in front of other spinners. When I do moves, they‘re not seeing what‘s happening, they‘re seeing what I‘m doing. They‘re seeing patterns, they‘re seeing specific moves being done.‖139 Ironically, Gomes feels more comfortable while being judged harder in the informal fire circle than in the Conclave, where technical precision appears less important since sometimes the most entertaining moves to large crowds (broad, dynamic movements or very fast spinning e.g.) are relatively easy to execute. This may be because fire spinning is a skill-based form of play. Participants continually push themselves and others to learn new moves and execute creative, increasingly complex routines. Such activities, which require the acquisition of technical skills and continued practice in order to achieve a degree of competency and, eventually, mastery, often lead to what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls ―flow experiences‖ or ―flow states.‖ Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as an optimal experience—what some people describe as the best moments in their life—where one becomes so absorbed in her activity that she loses herself in the moment; the skill takes over and she feels like she is acting spontaneously, ―as if carried away by the tides of a current.‖140 Understanding the nature of flow helps explain Gomes‘ greater comfort performing in front of other spinners. Activities conducive to flow share three main traits: they have clear goals, opportunities for unambiguous feedback, and potential for growth and skill development.141 Although a vast amount of human activities share these traits (from computer programming to brain surgery), Csikzsentmihalyi notes that the clear-cut rules and objectives of games and play make them particularly conducive to producing flow. In order to become proficient at a game, participants

138 Fire spinning circles generally keep water, towels, and a fire extinguisher on hand in case of an accident. As Sean put it, ―fire spinning is dangerously a one-man process.‖ There should always be a spotter present to ―watch your back… just in case the unthinkable happens, [like if] you drop your poi and it rolls into tank of fuel.‖ Sean, Interview by Bryan Schmidt. 139 Kate Harrison and Rafi Gomes, Interview by Bryan Schmidt. 140 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1993), 177. 141 Ibid., 181-187. 58 must dedicate time and energy to developing the requisite skill set; during the game itself, participants devote all of their faculties to executing these skills to the highest possible degree in order to accomplish the goal. This level of focus forces the participant to become ―lost‖ in the activity because, as Csikszentmihalyi describes: ―there is no attention left over to process any irrelevant information.‖142 Thus, those who experience flow feel a heightened state of awareness and a loss of self-consciousness as they become totally absorbed in the present moment.

Figure 3.1: An Intensely Focused Fire Spinner at Euphoria. Picture provided with permission by Joe Hunt

Fire performance clearly fulfills the necessary requirements for a flow state to arise. Participants acquire technical skills by learning different movements and becoming comfortable with the object; they have the clear goals of executing a clean, creative, and difficult routine; they have opportunities for feedback both from live audience reception and in the possibility of dropping or being burned by the object. Csikszentmihalyi indicates that many responses from people who enter a flow state report it as a spiritual or transcendent experience. Perhaps, then, the ―meditative state‖ Sean reported feeling during fire performance was his way of expressing

142 Ibid., 182. 59 his experience of flow. Gomes similarly reported a feeling of ―spiritual balance‖ during a strong performance, and describing reaching the point during spinning where ―you don‘t want to stop.‖143 Because, as Csikszentmihalyi describes, flow arises ―when there is unambiguous feedback as to how well [the participant] is doing,‖ the presence of more knowledgeable spectators and concurrently more strenuous judgment potentially enhances the possibility of entering a flow-state.144 Participants feel challenged to perform at their highest caliber and thus wholly dedicate their faculties to the task at hand. In contrast, spinning during the Conclave requires multiple foci in addition to the spun object, diffusing the spinner‘s concentration; because a performer shares the stage with others, she does not necessarily know whether the audience feedback is meant for herself or another spinner, or even whether cheers that arise come as organic responses to a well-executed combination or come out of an arbitrary social obligation to encourage the spinner to complete the ceremony. Thus, while I do not argue that it is impossible for a flow state to arise during the Conclave, I believe it to be significantly more difficult than when spinning informally. Fire spinning, as Gomes describes, is a ―non-competitive art‖ (a perspective that seemed to be prevalent among the spinners you spoke with and observed at Scorched Nuts, Euphoria, and Afterburn) where the challenge is not to outdo others, but to push oneself to stretch personal limits and achieve greater technical proficiency. Gomes‘ feeling of being ―more judged,‖ then, does not express a perception that he feels ranked by the other spinners present, but rather that his actions are being more closely monitored and deconstructed by spectators. The small audience of experts—whose opinions Gomes puts more stock into generally—pushes him to achieve higher levels of expertise. For instance, Kate Harrison (who spins staff) notes that during a fire-spinning routine, rather than watch the flames, more experienced spinners pay attention to the body movements used to execute each move: ―If they‘re technical[ly proficient], they‘re saying names of moves in their heads, and they‘re seeing what planes you‘re on. Every time I watch someone spin fire, I‘m watching for really interesting moves that I can learn. When they

143 Kate Harrison and Rafi Gomes, Interview by Bryan Schmidt. 144 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The Evolving Self, 179. Author‘s emphasis. 60 do a combo move I try to break down how they did that.‖145 Thus, spectatorship is not only an act of aesthetic consumption, but also a crucial source of training that enables the spectator‘s own growth and encourages further creative practice. Amongst experienced spinners, watching a fire spinning routine becomes as active an endeavor (though primarily a mental one as opposed to a physical one) as the performance itself, similarly holding the potential to induce a flow-like state in the spectator. Harrison notes: ―A lot of times you‘ll look at someone and watch someone‘s wrists, and it gets [you] lost.‖146 In analyzing the execution of moves and combinations, spectators come into contact with the performer‘s phenomenological body; close monitoring of this body creates a sort of entrancement that serves as a vital link between performer and spectator. This link holds a potential to transform the relationship between the individuals experiencing it into one of communitas. A central element of Turner‘s concept of communitas is Martin Buber‘s concept of the I-You relationship. Buber describes this relationship as an unmediated encounter between people where the subjects perceive themselves not as separate entities but as together, bound up in intimate relation to one another. He contrasts this with the I- It formation (the dominant formation in everyday life), where, to the subject, the other exists as an object to be perceived, experienced, or utilized in some way. In fire spinning, when performers and spectators become bound up together through the close perception of each others‘ phenomenological bodies, it potentially allows the I-You relationship to arise. Over the course of an evening such contact creates a deep connection between the members of the spinning group, enabling communitas to come about through the immediacy of the encounter between performer and spectator. Informal spinning sessions often last for hours with participants ―lighting up‖ (slang for engaging in fire performance) multiple times. Eventually, participants learn each other‘s skill level and can tell when someone pushes her limits or masters a new move. In the informal fire exhibitions I witnessed, such achievements were greeted with relatively subdued affirmation, even a simple utterance: ―There you go.‖ Perhaps the reason for such undemonstrative encouragement is to avoid breaking the spinner‘s flow state. While such praise may be less

145 ―Plane‖ is a technical term describing the spinning pattern in relation to the performer‘s body. For example, if a move takes place on the inside plane, it means the arm spinning the object must cross the performer‘s body to execute it. Kate Harrison and Rafi Gomes, Interview by Bryan Schmidt. 146 Ibid. 61 ostentatious than the cheers of the Conclave spectators, it communicates a rich, more intimate understanding of the labor required to accomplish the task. Not surprisingly, then, those who spin together often form deep communal bonds. Having discussed fire performances‘ role in community emergence, I would like to take a moment to reflect on why they are so central to the Burn experience. One thing that should be immediately apparent is that fire performance clearly embodies several of Burning Man‘s Ten Principles. It is an expressive art, but a dangerous one (what Jeremy Bentham might call an act of ―deep play,‖ where the risks are so great that to engage in the activity is inherently irrational), relying solely on the body of the performer, thus constituting both an act of radical self- expression and radical self-reliance. Because participants educate, encourage, and motivate one another, it is also an act of communal effort and participation. Most importantly, the flow state associated with fire performance makes it an act of immediacy, where the performer loses touch with the conscious self and taps into a spiritual, seemingly transcendent power. Participants experience immediacy by witnessing the phenomenological body of the performer when deeply concentrated on a performance. Immediate experience is described in the Ten Principles as ―in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture.‖147 I suggest that a reason for this is that such experiences are also often extremely potent—what Csikzsentmihalyi calls ―peak experiences.‖ He notes that those who experience such moments remember them as the best times of their lives, times when ―the problems and worries that in everyday life are a drain on psychic energy disappear.‖148 Unencumbered with such baggage, participants lower personal barriers and open themselves up to form deep bonds with others. Peak experiences thus play a crucial role in giving rise to communitas. Moreover, the danger of an activity such as fire performances—one is almost certain to be burned at some point—constitutes an acceptance of pain and suffering, one of Turner‘s qualities that characterizes communitas. What should not be lost in this highly technical explanation of fire performance is its breathtaking aesthetic beauty and deep symbolic resonance. Sean noted: ―These grown up versions of toys are ways of setting off the childlike state of being ignorant.‖149 To him, by placing participants and observers alike into this state of wonder and curiosity, fire performance presents an opportunity to melt away the emotional burdens and structural indoctrination accrued

147 ―Ten Principles,‖ Burning Man official website. 148 Mihaly Csikzsentmihalyi, The Evolving Self, 184. 149 Sean, Interview by Bryan Schmidt. 62 in daily life, and to replace them with a state of potentiality for creativity and discovery. He also notes: ―[Some fire spinners] wind up coming here with some kind of self-experience or transformation in mind. And what they do incidentally is provide that experience for other people.‖150 The heavy presence of fire spinning and object manipulation at Burns colors the entire environment with its magical, ritualistic quality, deepening the wonderment of the experience. Gomes takes a different but equally compelling view on the appeal of fire spinning: ―[W]hen you do fire dancing, you‘re using a very destructive force, something people tend to fear, and you‘re making it beautiful. You‘re using it in an incredibly aesthetically pleasing way. [That] challenges you to rethink things.‖151 His comment characterizes fire performance as an expression of human victory over a hostile natural force, a useful metaphor for discussing Burns in general: Over the course of a few days, burners travel to a natural environment, develop a functioning miniature city, and then take it all apart and vanish without a trace. Like fire- spinning, the process of construction and deconstructing expresses humans‘ power (the ability to dominate the landscape), but also their capacity for care and control (the ability to return the environment to essentially the same state it was in when they arrived). Perhaps, then, a final reason why fire spinning forms such a critical element of burner culture is because it represents the triumphal achievement of balance between nature and human. The Storm at Scorched Nuts: Weather and Community By staying out-of-doors, Burn participants must necessarily take on the elements. Coinciding with the Burning Man principle of radical self-reliance, enduring difficult weather conditions forms a central part of any Burn. The Big Burn itself is famously situated on an alkali flat in the Nevada desert referred to as the ―Playa,‖ a piece of land generally considered uninhabitable due to its vicious dust storms and arid conditions. Exposure to this extreme environment challenges participants‘ physical abilities and enables a more complete feeling of detachment from the comforts of the everyday world. An Afterburn participant and Burning Man veteran I interviewed named Torqken posited a directly proportional connection between testing one‘s bodily limits and testing one‘s social limits; he claimed that a central premise of Burns is that by enduring difficult physical conditions, people naturally open up to a deeper connection

150 Ibid. 151 Kate Harrison and Rafi Gomes, Interview by Bryan Schmidt. 63 with the others who do so alongside them.152 I find this view compelling in thinking about how community comes about at these events, and therefore devote this section to examining the effects of environment—harsh weather conditions in particular—in the Burn environment. Although regional Burns generally feature less severe climates than that of the Playa, uncomfortable, calamitous, or even dangerous weather conditions fundamentally determine the architecture, activities, and energy of the events. For some Burns, ―bad weather‖ is explicitly integral to the event itself, like Pennsylvania‘s early February Frostburn in which snow and freezing temperatures are not only ubiquitous, but part of the appeal. Frostburn‘s homepage reads: ―Imagine the climatic opposite of Burning Man: a frozen forest where ice and snow join fire and steam as mediums [. . .]. Where sharing warmth is not just a figure of speech, but a necessity. Where radical self-reliance and communal effort are critical for human survival [. . .].‖153 The statement expresses cold weather as a violent force to be overcome, but also as a tool for physically and emotionally bringing together participants. The description of ice, fire, and steam as ―mediums‖ alludes to an aesthetic experiencing of place where the natural environment serves as both an artist‘s canvas and a component of her palette. To explore the notion of the ways in which encountering the environment itself as aesthetic relates to the establishment of community at Burns, I wish to recount one of my own experiences with severe weather conditions—a thunderstorm that took place on the first night of Scorched Nuts. I think of this experience in terms of Diana Taylor‘s concept of the scenario, which considers the action of an activity (both what happens and the interactions of everyone involved) as being both framed by and responding to the event‘s setup.154 We might usefully think of beautiful, interesting, or extraordinary events that occur in a heightened theatrical zone as aesthetic scenarios that feel different from the mundane. In this case, the storm forms the setup that propels participants‘ actions in the Burn environment: The storm arose quickly, just as evening activities moved into full swing. Camp Daddy, the Ranger on duty, trudged through the rain and steadily increasing winds to warn participants that the storm would be getting much worse, and advised us to return to our camps to batten down the hatches. As I hurried back towards my tent, I came across Camp Death Barbie, whose

152 Torqken, Interview by Bryan Schmidt. 153 Note that radical self-reliance and communal effort are two of the Ten Principles of Burning Man. ―Frostburn,‖ Homepage, accessed February 11, 2012, http://frostburnpgh.com/. 154 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 28-29. 64 large event canopy—decorated with naked dolls smeared with blood-red paint—seemed in danger of blowing away completely. The six members of the theme camp enlisted help from me and several other passersby, and together we hunkered down underneath the canopy, holding tight to keep it from flying away. For about thirty minutes we fought gusts of wind so powerful that, even with ten people, it was difficult holding down the canopy, which was staked into the ground. Though we were all initially panicked, after some time the mood lightened as the group developed a level of cohesion and gained confidence that we could literally weather the storm. The larger wind gusts no longer met with panicked shouts, but instead with communal laughter; one participant pulled out a marijuana pipe and the Camp Death Barbie members took puffs in between gusts. Although I had not even introduced myself to any of the participants before the storm hit, by the time the winds died down a microcommunity had emerged beneath the tarp. Throughout the rest of the Burn I felt deeply connected with the members of Camp Death Barbie and those who assisted in saving it. Everyone involved talked to each other a great deal throughout the rest of the festival. Uncanny aesthetics—both environmental and human-made—served as crucial elements in this scenario. The storm provided a loud and visceral backdrop, while the naked, bloody dolls hanging from the canopy inserted an element of carnivalesque grotesqueness. Creative performance of self also contributed since one of the group was dressed as a faux-superhero wearing only a green Speedo, matching cape, neon shoes, and airman‘s goggles. He took the front-most position under the canopy—intentionally allowing himself to be drenched in rain— and screamed out in defiance of the storm each time a thunderbolt struck. Thus, although the task of saving the canopy was utilitarian in purpose, the unique combination of environmental, material, and personal aesthetics transformed it into a heightened play scenario. Wendy Clupper notes that such theatrical playing involves immediacy and has the effect of loosening inhibitions;155 this increased openness, I argue, led to the forging of intimate connections between all those who helped save Camp Death Barbie. A number of campsites—my own included—did not fare as well. Tents blew away, event canopies toppled over and broke, a bar where the majority of people had been congregating before the storm hit lay in ruins. As the weather died down, Camp Daddy walked the grounds to ask each participant what he or she had lost and assess whether that person needed a place to

155 Wendy Clupper, ―The Performance Culture of Burning Man,‖ 160. 65 sleep for the evening. Those whose campsites remained intact offered spare tents or even space on the ground of their own to people they had never met before, and some donated unsolicited labor and supplies to repair campsites that had been torn apart. The next morning, participants assisted in righting tents that had blown away and become entangled in the nearby treeline, or walked through the campgrounds picking up shards of detritus—classified in burner parlance as MOOP (matter out of place)—to maintain the integrity of the Burn‘s Leave No Trace policy. In short, although the storm destroyed many material belongings, it facilitated an outpouring of generosity, communal unity, and trust that enlivened the festival‘s atmosphere. A number of qualities associated with communitas can be identified here, including equality, humility, unselfishness, and heteronomy. The communal response to the storm facilitated the transformation of a field of private campsites into an overwhelmingly public space where participants felt welcome to come and go where they wished. The fluidity with which participants approached one another‘s living space was, to me, one of the most surprising aspects of the Burn, one that separated it from other lived- in festivals I had previously attended. At music festivals, for example, strangers entering campsites without permission were usually ignored or regarded with suspicion. At Scorched Nuts, however, they were welcomed and often invited to partake in whatever activity was currently happening (sharing a meal or drink, for example). I witnessed similar actions at Euphoria and Afterburn, and so I wonder if this might be a typical occurrence at Burns in general. Perhaps the Ten Principles, particularly those of radical inclusion, civic responsibility, communal effort, gifting, and participation, encourage participants to be inviting and hospitable even to those they do not well know. The storm served as a catalyst for these affable relations to arise. It is important to note that the communal unity arising after the storm did not come about through a prescribed activity in which all participants took part, but rather, through the aggregation of simultaneous improvised aesthetic encounters involving small, intimate groupings of people, such as my experience with Camp Death Barbie. Participants‘ responses to the setup of the storm formed a number of unique scenarios: some people piled underneath the solid structures that had been erected on the campgrounds (such as the effigy or other roofed installations), making up games to play with one another while struggling to stay as dry as possible; some people danced together in the rain—not always clothed—and then huddled by a

66 fire pit for warmth. Many of these activities (often between complete strangers) combined socialization, immediacy, playfulness, and physical activation, which engendered a localized communitas based upon intersubjectivity between the individuals who took part, and summated to create a more general sentiment of deep community felt throughout the festival grounds. Community through Playful Exploration Nature exerts a constant impact on festival activities, even when weather is not extreme. During the sweltering heat of the day, shaded areas tend to be the most active social spots; the darkness of evening hours gathers people into groups around available light sources, such as those provided by fire pits or well-lit theme camps. Despite objects and structures (including sculptures, art installations, theme camp buildings, etc.) being laid out for specific purposes by participants and organizers, the ever-shifting physical stimuli (the setup aspect of Taylor‘s scenario), as well as the freedom for improvisation and adaptation in unofficial activities, facilitate the use of such structures in creative, playful, and unpredictable ways. One example of a structure that offered many creative uses at Scorched Nuts was a participant-provided trampoline with a geodesic dome on top. The structure rose about twenty feet in the air and was covered with large black sheets of fabric speckled with neon paint splotches. Its owner hung several black lights from the top of the dome to illuminate these paint splotches during evening hours. The structure proved to be one of the most versatile apparatuses of the entire festival, its utility changing as different participants used it or different weather conditions prevailed. I will briefly track some of the different uses I witnessed in order to demonstrate the degree of collective exploration that participants engaged in, as well as to show how such activity seemed to bring participants together in a relationship resembling communitas: 1) As the owner began constructing the dome on top of the trampoline, he enlisted help from nearby participants. The building process was not simple; participants had to scale the dome and perch precariously at the top to hang the black lights or the black sheets of fabric. In the process, the builders‘ bodies became engaged in dynamic physical activity alongside one another. It was a playful labor, a task most seemed to find enjoyable because of the height and physical challenge the construction provided. Similar to the fire performers previously discussed, this placed participants in close contact with the phenomenological bodies of others, and bred a familiarity and friendliness amongst those who were around.

Similar to my experience with Camp Death Barbie in the storm, constructing the trampoline was both a physical practice that dynamically engaged the builders‘ bodies, and also an aesthetic situation. The precarious process of builders scaling the rickety dome to attach structural supports and ornaments, and then dropping down from a height and bouncing almost equally high seemed to have the potential to strike passersby as aesthetically pleasing in its visual excitement (it certainly did to me, and there was a small crowd of people gathered on and around the trampoline as the construction proceeded). The scorching heat of the afternoon sun replaced the thunderstorm as the intense backdrop; climbing and perching precariously on the highest point of the dome provided an equally exciting sensorial experience to being drenched by rain or hearing booming thunderclaps. Although the trampoline structure had little outward decoration (in comparison with Camp Death Barbie‘s macabre ornaments), participants attempting to accomplish complex jumping feats on the trampoline or spinning hula hoops nearby added similar visual and kinetic spectacle to the scenario. 2) When the owner draped the large sheets of fabric over the trampoline, providing a source of shade from the oppressive sun, participants began to repurpose the structure as a sort of shelter from the elements, rather than a playground. They used the trampoline not to bounce around on, but rather as a social space, sitting on the structure as a group and sharing stories, playing games of ―Never Have I Ever,‖ and drinking cold beers. Here, the relief from the sweltering heat of the afternoon sun contained the group in a set space and provided the heightened physical experience. Community clearly came about in these moments. The game of ―never have I ever‖ (in which I took part) placed participants in close, interpersonal encounters with one other. In the game, participants name some sort of risqué act (usually of a sexual nature), and the others playing must admit whether or not they have ever done the activity. While the purpose of the game usually revolves around ranking participants‘ sexual adventurism, it served an additional purpose in this instance; fundamentally, ―never have I ever‖ is a game about revealing secrets. In revealing private information, participants signify a degree of trust in those around them; the acknowledgement and acceptance of that information without judgment creates a communal bond. Thus, the participants repurposed the trampoline as a space of intimate personal encounter rather than a sensorial zone of playful vertigo. 3) As night fell, the trampoline became more and more exotic with the glow-in-the-dark speckles showing brilliantly under black lights, and the stars of the evening sky shining through

68 the hole in the middle of the dome. Participants carried glow sticks onto the trampoline and executed creative object manipulation routines while bouncing. Thus, the nighttime backdrop augmented the structure‘s aesthetic beauty, which, to some extent, lay dormant during the day. This beauty was surely also intensified by many spectators‘ tendency to take hallucinogens during evening hours. Just as participants altered the structure‘s function throughout the day, the changing weather (constituting a change of setup) spurred similar metamorphoses in the evening. 4) Finally, during the early morning hours after each evening‘s festivities, the trampoline became a sort of pleasure dome where participants engaged sexual activity in a stimulating environment. The constant repurposing of the trampoline space exemplifies participants‘ collective exploration of the potentiality of objects and structures in the festival zone. The ability to explore this potentiality separates the official activities—which are set and enacted in almost precisely the same manner for participants across all Burns, regardless of locality—from the unofficial activities that respond to the setup of each unique place. The freedom to explore unknown possibilities together helps participants break down the restrictive social structures that prevent interpersonal dialoguing and exchange. From my observations, the processes of playful discovery appeared to be deeply meaningful to those who took part in them, bringing participants physically and spiritually closer together. Conclusions While these case studies may appear random, they serve as viable samplings of the broad spectrum of activities that may be seen in Burns. Each case exemplifies the creation of communitas through close encounters between small groups of people that also contain a strong physical or sensorial component. Together they begin to hint at the wide-ranging variety of ways we might begin to conceive of aesthetic scenarios in a Burn environment and at how communitas might be achieved through participating in them. I do not intend to suggest that these examples are all-encompassing. Each scenario explored here contains elements of the others, and there are many different ways in which one might conceive of an aesthetic scenario arising. What I have tried to illustrate, though, is how a festival framing might create an acute sense of closeness between the mundane and the aesthetic situation. It suggests the appearance of aesthetics in predictable places (theme camps or fire performances, for instance), but also in unexpected ones such as in the midst of labor or calamitous weather.

This begins to articulate a festival space that functions not as a sort of art gallery where participants move from one distinct performance, sculpture, or theme camp to the next, but rather as a fun house that gleefully distorts and modulates a person‘s way of perceiving herself, others, and the world as they move from space to space, or encounter new people and objects. Combined with intimate physical contact, this perhaps leads to a flow state or a kind of vertigo that scrambles existing notions of the self‘s relation to the others around. This enables participants to shed barriers and preexisting assumptions, and to perhaps approach the new situation in an egalitarian relationship with those around. In this, participants potentially move from an I-It formation to an I-You formation, from structure to anti-structure, from mediation to communitas. Of course, as my previous chapters illustrate, unofficial activities still operate within the confines of the structure created by official activities, as well as within the rules and regulations of the festival and society proper. I therefore do not argue that unofficial activities are inherently anti-structural or separate from mediating forces, nor do I see them as the only places where communitas might arise at a Burn. I do believe, though, that these case studies demonstrate the spontaneous formation of fleeting immediate relationships between individuals within the interstices of a place and time that is always already regulated by an authority. While unofficial activities can never sidestep mediation, their relative intimacy and improvised nature often facilitate the occurrence of these interstitial, intersubjective relationships. A final concern I wish to remark on is the possible political significance of entering into an immediate, intersubjective experience. This, to a large degree, relies on individuals‘ perceived distance from those they encounter in the festival environment. Despite the monochromatic demographics at Burns, and the fact that all festival participants share some degree of commonality because they self-select to attend based on similar promotional materials, I perceive a substantial degree of heterogeneity in their class, age, and life experiences. One respondent to my questionnaire described the Burn community as ―a huge culmination of various subcultures,‖ citing specifically: ―nerds, trust fund hippies, scenester ravers, art[ists and], S&M goths)‖156 While I take the respondent‘s assessment of participants‘ specific subcultures to be only marginally indicative of the variety of subcultures that attend these events (and I rebuke the writer‘s disparaging choice of words to identify some of the groups), it hints at the wide divides participants might find between themselves and the others with whom they share the festival

156 Questionnaire #006, sent to the author on July 4, 2011. 70 space. Their ability to bridge these divides while experiencing communitas in the festival setting, even temporarily, creates the hope—a ―pathological hope‖ as Baz Kershaw might say—that in the quotidian world as well we might learn to perceive our similarities, accept and appreciate our differences, and work together to build a more fair and equal society in the quotidian world as well.

CONCLUSIONS A Brief Note on Methodology Michel Foucault refers to discourses as ―practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.‖157 This describes the (per)formative power of writing to materially affect its subject matter by altering readers‘ perception of it. Scholars must take this to heart as an empowering but cautionary matter related to their work. In creating this thesis, I have often felt a burden in being (to my knowledge) the first person to write on Regional Burns specifically in an academic context. Academic discourse carries an especially strong potential to colonize the object it describes since it often bears the weight of institutional authority behind it; I‘ve thus wondered about the effect my words might have on the perception of Burns both in the public realm and the burner community. Many of those I interviewed for this project were excited by the prospect of Burns finding a place in official discourse. Their excitement, I think, comes from an eagerness to see Burns gain a degree of mainstream legitimacy through becoming visible in the academic realm. Perhaps underlying this enthusiasm is a sense that many in the quotidian world view burners as deviant—perhaps because of the heavy presence of nudity, drug culture, and alternative sexual practices at Burns. One Scorched Nuts participant I interviewed claimed of the population at a Burn: ―Most of the people there seemed as though they didn‘t fit into the ‗mainstream.‘‖158 Certainly, many burners choose to consciously eschew traditional middle-class US values and self-identify as part of an alternative subculture, but I wonder if some share an interest in being included in or at least recognized by the mainstream. By articulating Burns as legitimate examples of cultural performance, I hope to counter viewpoints that see these activities and the people who engage in them as deviant or frivolous. Participants‘ interest in such a project, however, creates a potential pitfall in my methodology; as a participant-observer, I heavily relied on interviews, questionnaires, and informal conversations with them to form my own opinions of the Burn. I wonder whether some participants intentionally tried to valorize their festival experiences as a way to influence the ways in which I wrote about the events, and to what degree their positivity may have influenced

157 Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 49. 158 Questionnaire #006. 72 me. Of the many I spoke with for this project, I found only a couple participants who did not enjoy their Burn experience. Perhaps in future projects on these or similar events, in order to better maintain a sober disposition, or even to simply better define the criticism of the events, I should actively seek out those who did not enjoy or value them. I am also wary that by giving Burns public exposure, I inherently undermine their ability to remain private, hidden, and exotic. As I described in chapter one, Hakim Bey‘s writing on the T.A.Z. finds revolutionary potential in the elusiveness of off-the-grid gatherings that quickly arise and disappear again before being identified, categorized, and accounted for by global market forces. Public detection of such events inherently saps this potential by making the event available for acceptance, rejection, or consumption by a general public. As stated in chapter one, I do not believe Burns to be examples of T.A.Z.‘s per se, but I do believe that their current absence from the national zeitgeist is, to many burners, part of their charm. By writing publicly on Burns, then, I inherently undermine their ability to remain mysterious and thus potentially destabilize their appeal. Part of my project, then, has been to conceive how I might minimize my own impact on these events through my writing strategies. Ultimately, a thesis must have an argument to it, and the operative question is how might I put forth this argument without obscuring, omitting, or mischaracterizing what I saw or felt on the ground? One way I have attempted to do this is by avoiding any attempt to appear to catalogue all of the art, activities, and theme camps present at these events, so that the reader receives impressions of the Burn, rather than an encompassing representation that might substitute for it. I‘ve also written in the most detailed way on Burns‘ official activities—some of which (rules and guidance, e.g.) are already available as public discourse—rather than their unofficial activities. For these, I‘ve provided only a few case studies, and since unofficial activities dominate participants‘ time while in these festival environments, I therefore avoid painting an extremely detailed picture of what I perceive to be the heart of the Burn experience. Finally, I also avoid making generalizations on what constitutes burners or burner culture. In this way, I hope that what colonization inevitably occurs through my writing happens to the event, rather than a group of people or their culture. While Burns‘ monochromatic racial demographics may tempt one to characterize burner culture as homogeneous, I continually found it difficult to pin down common characteristics or even hobbies shared by participants. Many

73 were interested in fire spinning, but many were not; many took drugs, but many did not; many enjoyed talking about or engaging in sexual activity openly, but many did not; many were ecologically-minded, but many were not. What I‘ve found important in this work is to try to characterize something that seems to occur amongst this populace in the Burn environment—the emergence of temporary, deep community amongst relative strangers—rather than to define who they are and what they are like. Size Matters: Finding Community in the Very Small In the previous chapter, I chose to focus exclusively on unofficial activities at Scorched Nuts, rather than Euphoria, because I felt that I saw particularly potent evocations of communitas at that festival, more so than any other event I studied. I suggest that this might have had to do with the size of its population. In the 1990s, cognitive psychologist and anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggested 150 as the approximate upper limit to the number of stable social relationships—where an individual knows each person in the population and how she relates to everyone else—that an individual can maintain, based on the size of the brain‘s neocortex.159 This theory, sometimes called ―Dunbar‘s number,‖ suggests that in populations larger than 150 people, it is generally impossible to form intimate relationships with the entire community simply because there are too many people to keep track of. Scorched Nuts was the only festival I studied with a population lower than the Dunbar number, and this gave it several characteristics that seemed amenable to the possibility of intersubjective exchange: 1) It allowed participants to meet, or at least see, every other person who occupied the space with them. Although, as with large festivals, people still tended to socialize in very small groups, by the end of the weekend it seemed like most people had visited with or somehow recognized everyone else in the space. This allowed participants to feel more comfortable with one another, and gave the festival an intimate quality like that of a family reunion. 2) The smaller population meant that there were fewer people to bring activities and entertainment apparatuses to the festival. This made it so there were fewer ostensible ―things to do‖ in the festival environment (it would take only a few minutes to visit every structure or theme camp in the building bounds), which forced participants to seek enlivenment by meeting and socializing with one another. In contrast, as Burns (including Burning Man) grow in size,

159 Robin Dunbar, ―Coevolution of Neocortical Size, Group Size and Language in Humans,‖ Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16.4 (1993), 681–735. 74 more and more different activities and theme camps pepper the festival grounds, so that individuals can spend a good deal of their time exploring these attractions rather than socializing with others. 3) It allowed organizers to maintain a relatively lax atmosphere, especially in regards to implementing official activities. Dunbar suggests that groups maintain cohesion through intimate physical contact (his most famous example being the grooming procedures in chimpanzees); in groups over 150 people, where such contact is not possible, social cohesion must be maintained through procedures that simulate (but never quite live up to) this experience, such as collectively enacted or ritual activities.160 Thus, we might expect for festivals populated by more than 150 people to have more uniform and regimented official procedures in order maintain social cohesion in the space. I found this to be the case at Euphoria, and predict it would be even more acutely so at the larger Regional Burns and Burning Man proper. As do Turner, Dolan, Buber, and myself, Dunbar valorizes intimate encounters between people as some of the most gratifying experiences one can have. My decision to focus on regional Burns in this thesis—especially the diminutive Scorched Nuts—as opposed to their progenitor owes to an effort to relocate our sense of awe and wonderment in the activities of the very small rather than the very big. This thesis, as a whole, concerns itself with questioning how shifting our interests away from large, centralized, heavily capitalized events (i.e. Burning Man) and towards small, local, relatively economical ones (Burns) might help emphasize community and intersubjectivity as event attractions in and of themselves. It advocates the decentralization of discourse away from prominent, nationally recognized events and towards unacknowledged or perhaps unseen local activities that are similarly fecund with cultural expression. And it ultimately views deep, intersubjective communitas as a relation that tends to arise in small-scale social scenarios that occur during the interstices of festival time.

160 Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press), 1996, 146-147. 75

APPENDIX A

“THE TEN PRINCIPLES OF BURNING MAN”161

Radical Inclusion: Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.

Gifting: Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.

Decommodification: In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.

Radical Self-reliance: Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.

Radical Self-expression: Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.

Communal Effort: Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.

Civic Responsibility: We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws.

Leaving No Trace: Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.

Participation: Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.

Immediacy: Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.

161 ―Statement of Principles,‖ Burning Man regional network, accessed January 24, 2012. http://regionals.burningman.com/network_principles.html. Note: This was also the list of Ten Principles that appeared on the Scorched Nuts website. 76

APPENDIX B

“EUPHORIA’S LIST OF TEN PRINCIPLES ”162

The 10 principles here were created by, and continue to guide Burning Man, and are central to everything that is Euphoria. This is what it means to burn.

Radical Inclusion: Everyone is welcome, all types, all kinds, friends, strangers, and in between.

Gifting: Gifts are unconditional offerings, whether material, service oriented, or even less tangible. Gifting does not ask for a return or an exchange for something else.

Decommodification: Hand in hand with gifting, burns are environments with no commercial transactions or advertising. Nothing is for sale—we participate rather than consume.

Radical Self-reliance: You are responsible for you. Bring everything with you that you need. Burns are an opportunity for you to enjoy relying on yourself.

Radical Self-expression: What are your gifts, talents, and joys? Only you can determine the form of your expression.

Communal Effort: Cooperation and collaboration are cornerstones of the burn experience. We cooperate to build social networks, group spaces, and elaborate art, and we work together to support our creations.

Civic Responsibility: Civic responsibility involves the agreements that provide for the public welfare and serve to keep society civil. Event organizers take responsibility for communicating these agreements to participants and conducting events in accordance with applicable laws.

Leaving No Trace: In an effort to respect the environments where we hold our burns, we commit to leaving no trace of our events after we leave. This means everything that you bring with you goes home with you. Everyone cleans up after themselves, and whenever possible, we leave our hosting places better than we found them.

Participation: The radical participation ethic means you are the event. Everyone works; everyone plays. No one is a spectator or consumer.

Immediacy: From the Burning Man website: ―Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.‖

162 ―Ten Principles,‖ Euphoria official website, accessed January 25, 2012, http://euphoriaburn.com/10-principles. 77

APPENDIX C

“IRB LETTER OF APPROVAL”

Office of the Vice President For Research Human Subjects Committee Tallahassee, Florida 32306-2742 (850) 644-8673, FAX (850) 644-4392

APPROVAL MEMORANDUM

Date: 7/11/2011

To: Bryan Schmidt

Address: *****

Dept.: THEATRE

From: Thomas L. Jacobson, Chair

Re: Use of Human Subjects in Research The Heightened Theatrical Zone of Lived-In Festivals

The application that you submitted to this office in regard to the use of human subjects in the proposal referenced above have been reviewed by the Secretary, the Chair, and one member of the Human Subjects Committee. Your project is determined to be Expedited per 45 CFR Â§ 46.110(7) and has been approved by an expedited review process.

The Human Subjects Committee has not evaluated your proposal for scientific merit, except to weigh the risk to the human participants and the aspects of the proposal related to potential risk and benefit. This approval does not replace any departmental or other approvals, which may be required.

If you submitted a proposed consent form with your application, the approved stamped consent form is attached to this approval notice. Only the stamped version of the consent form may be used in recruiting research subjects.

If the project has not been completed by 7/6/2012 you must request a renewal of approval for continuation of the project. As a courtesy, a renewal notice will be sent to you prior to your expiration date; however, it is your responsibility as the Principal Investigator to timely request renewal of your approval from the Committee.

You are advised that any change in protocol for this project must be reviewed and approved by the Committee prior to implementation of the proposed change in the protocol. A protocol change/amendment form is required to be submitted for approval by the Committee. In addition, federal regulations require that the Principal Investigator promptly report, in writing any unanticipated problems or adverse events involving risks to research subjects or others.

By copy of this memorandum, the Chair of your department and/or your major professor is reminded that he/she is responsible for being informed concerning research projects involving human subjects in the department, and should review protocols as often as needed to insure that the project is being conducted in compliance with our institution and with DHHS regulations.

This institution has an Assurance on file with the Office for Human Research Protection. The Assurance Number is FWA00000168/IRB number IRB00000446.

Cc: Elizabeth Osborne, Advisor HSC No. 2011.6479

APPENDIX D

“CONSENT FORM”

You are invited to be in a research study entitled ―The Heightened Theatrical Zone of Lived-In Festivals‖. You were selected as a possible study participant because of your participation in [Preheat/Afterburn/Euphoria/Scorched Nuts/Summer Camp Music Festival]. We ask that you read this form and ask any questions you may have before agreeing to be in the study. This study is being conducted by Bryan Schmidt with the Florida State University School of Theatre. The purpose of this study is to better understand the experience of festival goers at music and arts festivals where subjects live inside the festival environment for a period of days.

Procedures:

If you agree to be in this study, you will be asked to answer a brief survey questionnaire on your festival experience with a series of optional, non-invasive questions. Your participation is voluntary and you can stop the survey at any time without any penalty for you. You may also choose not to answer certain questions if you so desire. You may also provide contact information to the researcher that he may interview you at a later date.

Risks and benefits of being in the Study:

In participating in this study, you will not encounter any risk higher than that you might experience in everyday life. There are no personal benefits or compensation for participating in this study.

Confidentiality:

The records of this study will be kept private and confidential to the extent permitted by law. In any sort of report we might publish, we will not include any information that will make it possible to identify you. Research records will be stored securely and only researchers will have access to the records. In all electronic records, your name will be replaced by a code number, a link between which will be kept for 18 months after IRB approval of the study (approximately January 2013) except in cases in which subjects ask to be kept anonymous, in which case the link will be destroyed. Data will be stored for at least three years after the completion of the study, at which time the data may be destroyed or kept indefinitely.

Voluntary Nature of the Study:

Participation in this study is voluntary. Your decision whether or not to participate will not affect your current or future relations with the University. If you decide to participate, you are free to not answer any question or withdraw at any time without affecting those relationships.

Illicit Activities

Please refrain from speaking to any illicit activities in your responses. If illicit activities are divulged, where possible the primary investigator will destroy the link between your responses and any direct identifiers. However, we are required by law to notify the proper authorities if you admit to a serious crime.

For E-mail Responses:

I understand that by returning this completed form via e-mail to the primary investigator I allow my responses to be used for the purposes of the study entitled ―The Heightened Theatrical Zone of Lived-In Festivals‖. I understand that no names or identifying information will be used in any research published, and that the only record of my response will be kept on a password-protected computer of the primary researcher. The link between

80 my name and my response will be kept on this computer until January of 2013, at which time the link will be destroyed. Data will be stored for at least three years after the completion of the study, at which time the data may be destroyed or kept indefinitely.

Contacts and Questions:

The researcher conducting this study is Bryan Schmidt. You may ask any question you have now. If you have a question later, you are encouraged to contact him at *****, or *****. You may also contact the project‘s advisor, Dr. Elizabeth Osborne at *****.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding this study and would like to talk to someone other than the researcher(s), you are encouraged to contact the FSU IRB at 2010 Levy Street, Research Building B, Suite 276, Tallahassee, FL 32306-2742, or 850-644-8633, or by email at [email protected].

APPENDIX E

“PREHEAT/AFTERBURN QUESTIONNAIRE”

Note: Please take time to read the consent form below before answering these questions. It is best to answer by simply writing your response next to each question on the page and then e-mailing the file as a .doc or .docx file back to *****. Please make sure that the consent form is present in the file you send back and feel free to e-mail if you have any questions. Thanks so much for your time!

PREHEAT/AFTERBURN QUESTIONNAIRE (Please answer each question to the best of your ability)

Name: ______Age: _____

1. Why did you decide to attend the Preheat and/or Afterburn?

2. Have you ever been to this festival or other comparable festival experiences before? What were the names of these events? (Please feel free to give a brief description of the event in question if explanation is needed)

3. In what way(s) were these events similar? This similarity can be in terms of the organization of the event, the type of people you saw present at the event, the sort of performances or activities present, or the sort of emotions you felt at the event.

4. In what way(s) were the events different?

5. What, if any, effect does the lived-in aspect of the festival (i.e. camping on the festival grounds) have on your overall festival experience?

6. In your own words, how would you describe the community that comes to festivals like these?

7. Outside of the festival, do you regularly attend individual music concerts?

8. Do you feel differently when you are at the festival than during your everyday life? If so, can you describe these differences?

9. Are there any other aspects of this festival or other festivals that you think are important to mention in understanding your overall experience?

APPENDIX F

“SCORCHED NUTS QUESTIONNAIRE”

Note: Please take time to read the consent form below before answering questions. It is best to answer by simply writing your response next to each question on the page and then e- mailing the file as a .doc or .docx file back to *****. Please make sure that the consent form is present in the file you send back and feel free to e-mail if you have any questions.

FESTIVAL QUESTIONNAIRE

1. Why did you decide to attend the Scorched Nuts Burn?

2. Have you ever been to other comparable festival experiences before? What were the names of these events? (Please feel free to give a brief description of the event in question if explanation is needed)

4. In what way(s) were the events different?

5. What, if any, effect does the lived-in aspect of the festival (i.e. camping on the festival grounds) have on your overall festival experience?

6. In your own words, how would you describe the community that comes to festivals like these?

7. Do you feel differently (mentally, physically, spiritually) when you are at the festival than during your everyday life? If so, can you describe these differences?

8. Are there any other aspects of this festival or other festivals that you think are important to mention in understanding your overall experience?

APPENDIX G

“EUPHORIA QUESTIONNAIRE”

FESTIVAL QUESTIONNAIRE (Please answer each question to the best of your ability)

1. Why did you decide to attend the Euphoria Burn?

4. In what way(s) were the events different?

5. What, if any, effect does the lived-in aspect of the festival (i.e. camping on the festival grounds) have on your overall festival experience?

6. In your own words, how would you describe the community that comes to festivals like these?

7. Outside of the festival, do you regularly attend individual music concerts?

8. Do you feel differently when you are at the festival than during your everyday life? If so, can you describe the these differences?

9. Are there any other aspects of this festival or other festivals that you think are important to mention in understanding your overall experience?

APPENDIX H

“SUMMER CAMP MUSIC FESTIVAL QUESTIONNAIRE”

FESTIVAL QUESTIONNAIRE (Please answer each question to the best of your ability)

1. Why did you decide to attend the Summer Camp Music festival?

4. In what way(s) were the events different?

5. What, if any, effect does the lived-in aspect of the festival (i.e. camping on the festival grounds) have on your overall festival experience?

6. In your own words, how would you describe the community that comes to festivals like these?

7. Outside of the festival, do you regularly attend individual music concerts?

8. Do you feel differently when you are at the festival than during your everyday life? If so, can you describe the these differences?

9. Are there any other aspects of this festival or other festivals that you think are important to mention in understanding your overall experience?

APPENDIX I

“PHOTO RELEASE FORM 1”

APPENDIX J

“PHOTO RELEASE FORM 2”

* Note: Final verification received via e-mail. For further proof of permission granted, please contact the primary researcher.

Photo Release Form

I Joseph Hunt hereby give permission to Bryan Schmidt to use my photos of Matt Starbuck Fire Spinning at Euphoria and the Euphoria Effigy for the purposes of his Florida State University Master’s thesis entitled “’Welcome Home’: Engendering Community through Performance and Play at the Scorched Nuts and Euphoria Regional Burns.” I understand that I will not be compensated for use of the photo, and that it will be published along with the thesis through Florida State University and may be accessible to public view.

Joseph Hunt 06/05/2012

If any further verification is required I can be reached by phone at 678-663-0302 or by e- mail at [email protected].

Contacts and Questions:

The researcher conducting this study is Bryan Schmidt. You may contact him with any questions you may have at any point at 513-317-7088, or [email protected]. You may also contact the project‘s advisor, Dr. Elizabeth Osborne at [email protected].

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Bonnaroo Music Festival questionnaire respondent. Study Codes Q03, Q12, Q16. Questionnaire distributed on June 10, 2011. E-mail to author.

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Clupper, Wendy. Interview by author. Telephone. November 2, 2011. Audio recording.

Euphoria Official Website. Last updated March 17, 2012. http://www.euphoriaburn.com

Euphoria questionnaire respondent. Study Codes Q02, Q13. Questionnaire distributed on June 17, 2011. E-mail to author.

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Kyle. Interview by author. Lakeland, FL. November 12, 2011. Audio recording.

Pascal. Interview by author. Lakeland, FL. November 12, 2011. Audio recording.

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Steven B. Interview by author. Telephone. September 19, 2011. Audio recording.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Bryan Schmidt received a BA in Theatre from Miami University in 2008. He is currently completing work on his MA degree in Theatre Studies from Florida State University, from which he will graduate in the summer of 2012. He will attend the Theatre Historiography PhD program at the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities starting in the fall of 2012.