On the Edge of Utopia:

  Since 1986, Burning Man has evolved from founder Larry Harvey’s personal healing ritual into a cultural movement where ritual, visual art, and performance collide on an epic scale. During the week before Labor Day, forty-nine thousand people gather in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert to 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. In this book Rachel Bowditch – performer, theatre director, scholar, and Burning Man participant – explores the spectrum of performance and ritual practices within Black Rock City from the everyday to spectacle, from the profane to the sublime. Burning Man can be seen as a revival of the ancient Roman Saturnalia, a site for rehearsals of utopia, and a secular pilgrimage that is forging new paradigms for performance, installation art, community, and invented rituals bringing the avant-garde into the 21^st century.