This dissertation offers a critical framework through which to consider performance and performers within the Burning Man community as applied to Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of Carnival and the Schema for Theatrical Eventness proposed by the International Federation for Theatre Research Theatrical Events Working Group. Represented at Burning Man and this dissertation will investigate and theorize how a new performance culture has emerged from the festival itself and by its presence as a theatrical event, has exposed and expanded performance and theatre forms. Performance forms of all kinds historically are As one of a handful of North American festivals which expressly discourage commercialism and commodification, theatricality takes the place of significance for entertainment and communication. This dissertation maps out the cultural terrain of Burning Man in order to explain how performing there is form of identity-making and cultural commodity.
Make-shift stages and theme camps, as well as largescale interactive art pieces play host to participants who dress up in fanciful costumes to perform in all manner of imagining. While the natural environment there is hostile, the creative atmosphere is welcoming and invites a broad scope of performative behaviors and genres to be exhibited there, the entire week the festival takes place. In 2006, this festival attracted over forty thousand participants to the Black Rock Desert in Northwestern Nevada to a flat dusty Playa surrounded by mountain ranges. Theatre in the United States for the last twenty years has been evolving in scope by way of a cultural phenomenon known as Burning Man. Hildy, Department of Theatre and Performance Studies THE PERFORMANCE CULTURE OF BURNING MAN Wendy Ann Clupper, PhD, 2007ĭr.