Light Cue 23

I know it has been some time since my last real post here. I have been very busy working on projects for the Barter Theatre and the Marin Theatre Company as well as a large scale private event in the fall.

One of the things that has also contributed to the slow down in posting was that I attended the Burning Man festival for the first time at the end of August. I have been hearing about it for at least ten years, but despite the hundreds of stories I have heard and thousands of pictures I have seen, nothing could prepare me for the actual experience. It is quite literally like nothing else I have experienced.

There are plenty of large scale dance events to go to. There are sculpture gardens. There are Art Car conventions. There are deserts. there are Goth clubs, and victorian societies and punks and Astor Place. But to have all of that in one location where the energy just flows from one to the next to the next is unlike any other festival I have been to.

It seems pointless really to try and describe the experience. I have been doing so for the last week and always the description fails to encapsulate the magic of the experience. Because it is not any single thing, but rather the hyper-intense confluence of many different things.

But the Artwork truly blew me away. The scale of the individual pieces was powerful in its own right, but then there was just so much of it! And so much good work.

My rule of thumb for any festival is that 98% of it is crap. And by and large that bears out in practice. In a good festival perhaps 5 or even 10% of the work is actually worth ones money or attention. There is no point in getting caught up in the crap. Its there. It always was and always will be. The way to judge it is by the quality of the 2%.

And boy was that 2% amazing!

So much so that all I did, when not hiding in the shade from the heat, was look at art. Not much dancing. Art.

Friday night I wandered the desert alone for over six and a half hours going from sculpture to installation. It was amazing. A vague soundtrack of electronic beats followed me as I traversed the desert keeping in synch, somehow, with the mood and style of the work I was seeing.

And then there was Thursday, when I was driving around in my friend’s cloud car and we got caught in a white out dust storm for over an hour deep in the middle of the desert. And what else do you do when trapped in whiteout conditions with ten people, one of them an eight year old kid and a pile of LED lightsabers? Why you jump out and have epic sword fights of course!

So many experiences and I keep getting asked, “What was your favorite?” but that is like asking a mother who her favorite child is. They are all so amazing, that you just love them each, the most, for their wonderful and unique qualities.