What is Burning Man: 10 Things You Should Know About This Crazy Festival

What is Burning Man: 10 Things You Should Know About This Crazy Festival

 

With every passing year, Burning Man reinvents and entrenches itself as a modern cultural buzzword. Freedom of creative expression, debauchery, radical inclusivity, problematic exclusivity; all of these things have recently been associated with the increasingly (in)famous festival. But the mammoth into which it’s grown is a far cry from its modest origins.

 

Burning Man started as an unspectacular, small-scale bonfire on Baker Beach, San Francisco in 1986. It only transformed into something much bigger four years later when it relocated to Nevada’s expansive desert lake

– Black Rock City. Since then it’s grown incrementally in terms of size, participation and cost.

 

In short, Burning Man could be described as an annual festival, bridging the last week in August and the first in September, in which 70,000 people gather in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, assemble and inhabit a giant city throughout the course of a week, and then burn the centerpiece effigy of a wooden Man. With the festival’s conclusion, the playa is left as it was found – devoid of architectural structures, material waste or, in fact, any trace of human activity. In fact such is the commitment of its participants that Burning Man is visibly more than a festival; a societal experiment, an immersive artistic experience, and a participatory cultural ethos.

 

Each year’s festival takes on a new theme: 2015 played host to the ‘Carnival of Mirrors’, 2016 to ‘Da Vinci’s Workshop’, and 2017 will see the enigmatic ‘Radical Ritual’. Each year is different, but every incarnation of Burning Man shares one unifying feature – volition for expression, participation and non-conformity. For those who want it straight from the horse’s mouth, Burning Man’s organizers have outlined the 10 core principles behind the event. But here we’ve gone beyond the official source to give you a real taste of the brilliantly bizarre and utterly unique experience that is Burning Man.