Description

Book Synopsis
During the week before Labor Day every year, nearly fifty thousand people gather in Nevada's Black Rock Desert and build Black Rock City. At the center of Black Rock City is a forty-foot wooden effigy of a man, an icon around which art, performance, and community revolve. Since 1986, the Burning Man Festival has evolved from founder Larry Harvey's personal healing ritual into a cultural movement where ceremony, religion, visual art, and performance converge on an epic scale. In "On the Edge of Utopia", Rachel Bowditch - performer, theater director, scholar, and Burning Man participant - explores the spectrum of performance and ritual practices within Black Rock City from the everyday to wild spectacle, the profane to the sublime. Bowditch argues that Burning Man can be understood as a contemporary galaxy of happenings, a revival of the ancient Roman Saturnalia, a site for rehearsals of utopia, and a secular pilgrimage. As Burning Man continues to grow, it will create new paradigms for performance, installation art, community, and invented rituals that bridge ancient traditions to the twenty-first century.

On the Edge of Utopia: Performance and Ritual at

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    A Hardback by Rachel Bowditch

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      Book details

      Publisher Seagull Books London Ltd
      Published 9 July 2010
      ISBN-13 9781906497255
      978-1906497255
      ISBN-10 1906497257
      Also in:
      The arts: general topics Pageants, parades, festivals

      Description

      Book Synopsis
      During the week before Labor Day every year, nearly fifty thousand people gather in Nevada's Black Rock Desert and build Black Rock City. At the center of Black Rock City is a forty-foot wooden effigy of a man, an icon around which art, performance, and community revolve. Since 1986, the Burning Man Festival has evolved from founder Larry Harvey's personal healing ritual into a cultural movement where ceremony, religion, visual art, and performance converge on an epic scale. In "On the Edge of Utopia", Rachel Bowditch - performer, theater director, scholar, and Burning Man participant - explores the spectrum of performance and ritual practices within Black Rock City from the everyday to wild spectacle, the profane to the sublime. Bowditch argues that Burning Man can be understood as a contemporary galaxy of happenings, a revival of the ancient Roman Saturnalia, a site for rehearsals of utopia, and a secular pilgrimage. As Burning Man continues to grow, it will create new paradigms for performance, installation art, community, and invented rituals that bridge ancient traditions to the twenty-first century.

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