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Festival makes burning statement

Monday, September 6, 1999

By D. PARVAZ Mail Author
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Build it and they will come.

Burn it and they will dance.

That was the case during the past week at the 13th annual Burning Man Festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert.

Dubbed everything from a rave to a social experiment of sorts (organizers prefer the latter to the former), the festival is a weeklong buildup to the main event: burning a massive, wooden man. For the entire week leading up to the Labor Day weekend, artists -- both aspiring and professional -- in the desert built what they call Black Rock City, as they do every year.

The event itself isn't commercially advertised, yet its popularity has grown enormously. Most of those who attend the festival hear about it through the Internet or word of mouth. This year, more than 23,000 folks -- mostly artists -- gathered in the wind-blown region near Gerlach, about two hours northeast of Reno, to watch the man burn Saturday night. For some, it was a sacred ritual, something they couldn't explain to anyone who wasn't there.

"It's like watching everything bad that has happened to you burn into the sky, leaving nothing but ashes," said Alisha Henders, watching the crowd dance, chant and bang drums while circling the flaming man. She drove to the event from Miami with her sister, Joy.

"All it leaves are ashes, like dust . . . it all goes back in the desert . . . and we all came from dust," she added.

Others see it as the party to beat all parties.

"I'm not really going to look for deep meanings in this," said Joel Narisa of San Francisco. "I'm just here now, and I'm enjoying the vibe . . . seeing the energy and the people . . . it's a good time."

If the number of participants doesn't seem impressive, consider that a crowd of 20 stood on San Francisco's Baker Beach to watch artist Larry Harvey torch his first Burning Man back in 1986.

Then again, everything seemed bigger this year, including the Burning Man himself. Thirteen years ago, the man was about 8 feet tall. This year, the structure itself was 40 feet high and stood on a 12-foot-high platform.

Now the man is burned in Black Rock, a temporary city with its own daily paper (the Black Rock Gazette), radio station (99.5 FM) and medical center.

It's a city overrun with art installation after art installation. Massive sculptures and structures, anything from pyramids filled with light and sound to neon streams, dot the camp. The majority of the structures were illuminated at night, giving the usually barren desert a curiously lived-in look.

Black Rock City is a free-living kind of place, but even here, there are rules and problems with which to deal. Dr. Jim Allen had a busy week at the Burning Man first-aid clinic.

"We're seeing a lot of GHB this year," he said, referring to the respiratory depressant gamma hydroxy butaric acid.

"GHB is so unpredictable that it's hard to know how much to take. Also, they're mixing it with everything from alcohol to mushrooms," Allen says. As of yesterday afternoon, 660 people had been treated at the clinic, most of them for heat and drug-related injuries.

There's an "all-participants-no-spectators rule at Burning Man, so even if attendees aren't artists themselves, they are expected to somehow contribute to the environment.

They can either do something interesting with their camp area (themes run the gamut from the Barbie National Freedom Fighters to Papal Indulgence), handing out neat little trinkets and treats (incense sticks, body paint), volunteering to help with certain art installations or just doing something thoughtful for others.

A much-appreciated example of this sort of thing was the Salvation Station, a generous supply of sunscreen and lip salve set up by Christie Mitchell of White Field, Maine.

"This is days of SPF 50 and 30, and I'm still burning," she laughed, pointing to a freckled shoulder. "I just thought that everyone could really use this," said Mitchell, who has been thanked by many in typical Black Rock style: lots of nice notes, necklaces and lollipops.

Black Rock residents live in their own little world -- galaxy, actually. The city is semicircular, and the area around it is divided into seven tracks, each named after a planet in the solar system.

All of this is temporary, and as soon as Burning Man is over, the campers leave, and the city is packed up for yet another year. The motto of the place is "Leave No Trace," and residents take this quite seriously. Ashkahn Rezai -- up from Los Angeles for the entire week -- likes the idea.

"The next day after getting home, this whole thing starts feeling like a strange dream," he said, looking around as the surrounding camp disappeared. "The fact that there's no physical mark anywhere . . . it just makes the dream that much more perfect."

P-I reporter D. Parvaz can be reached at 206-448-8095 or dparvaz@seattle-pi.com

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