City of Fire

One of the themes of Burning Man is fire. An early concept that started here was burnable art. This relates directly to the burning of the Man on Saturday and the temple on Sunday. After a while, burn platforms were required so that the playa would not be scarred by the fires. Then there was spinning and breathing fire, a tradition that has mellowed out over the years — for example, you no longer see people standing around breathing fire or spinning fire inside the camp. But now you can frequently see them many other places (as far flung as Paris and Krakow), which I attribute to Burning Man.

Many of the art installations have a fire theme, such as this one outside Centercamp. I can’t find any detailed images of this piece, but it’s a welded steel sculpture fed by propane fuel that creates the scene of a cage of flames. Most of the fire art seemed to utilize propane this year, including a structure with a steel ceiling where the propane was fed in from above, creating a positively strange effect of balls of fire trapped clinging to the ceiling as people laid on their backs, on the ground, watching from about 10 feet below. I saw a few people waking around with propane flame throwers, and other exhibits would send out jets of flame into the night sky.

Playing with fire makes me a little nervous. One night a guy with a propane flame thrower was standing right outside Poly Paradise as a few people watched. Our camp was made of these delicate canvas shade structures that looked a little too flammable for that to be going on right outside. I really wanted to ask him to take his show elsewhere but I wasn’t sure of the etiquette involved. Anyway, after watching for a while I decided that he seemed to be sober and know what he was doing; so I just put the light around him and wandered off to a different activity. During my five days at Burning Man I spent a fair amount of time talking to medics and didn’t hear of a single incident of a person getting burned.