Burning Man 1997 | Theme Camps and Villages
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Create a Theme Camp
by Harley K. Bierman, Human Resource Manger & Theme Camp Director
For those of us that are imaginative doers, desiring to help mold the interactive experience of Burning Man for themselves and others...a Theme Camp is for you. Choose any idea that you can embrace completely and share with others. Become another animal, vegetable or mineral, character, period, or concept, for a weekend. Create an environment-- your camp-- that draws people in and encourages enthusiastic interaction in whatever way fits. Challenge yourself and others.
Theme camps are the fabric of Burning Man. Each camp creates a texture in the cloth that dresses each year's event. The mantle is always different. Unlike The Man, Theme Camps were never consciously constructed. They were, instead, a natural out-growth of the spirit of the event. They just happened, and still just happen. What can one expect when creative, enterprising, adventurous and innately gregarious people are thrown together into an environment that very closely resembles a blank canvas; a flat, white, uniformly textured expanse with seemingly endless boundaries? The painting comes to life. Consider the third dimension, and the activity of daily life while camping? How do the performers, musicians, costumers, sculptors, tradesmen, philosophers, writers interact in this environment? Theme Camps!
Burning Man began, in its Nevada incarnation, with few organized events: the pre-burn cocktail party, the fashion show, the BLM talks about the land's history, and, of course, the Burn. To fill the days people would stroll the half circle perimeter, one camp-site deep, and check out what everyone else was doing; a sort of Sunday afternoon promenade down the Champs d'Elyse, everyone dressed or camping in their individual finery, inviting conversation and interaction as they saw fit. I was invited, my first year, for morning tea and was amazed to find a full set of china and a silver tea set, a pot steeping lazily at sunrise. My friend was dressed to the nines in his vintage military regalia, reclining easily in his wooden rocker. Another well known founder of the event had built his own house on the playa, complete with a pitched roof and lawn space.
With the following year came "Christmas Camp" an abrasive ass- pinching scrawny Santa, spouting "Come and sit on Santa's lap, Honey!" The camp was covered with tinsel and Christmas decorations. Christmas music played continually, and Santa's elf was in full uniform--red hat, jacket and a velvet mini skirt. Four months later a Christmas card was sent to me: a desert Santa with a g- string clad woman on each knee. It was with Peter Doty's Christmas Camp that the Theme Camp was born.
Please come and help to weave this year's tapestry of theme camps. Register your theme camp online or email themecamps@burningman.com and let us know what you are planning. We will place you on the map and encourage visitors with a short blurb in the Survival Guide. Depending on the theme, some camps may want to be placed upon the Grand Boulevard.
If you'd like to know more about what a village is, and how it fits into Burning Man read What is a Village, an excerpt from Larry Harvey's newsletter article, The Year of Community -- You are a Founder. It briefly profiles the Blue Light Village and the infrastructure they have created. We have found it to be an exemplary working model for the Village concept.
Building community through the Internet has proven itself to be useful in connecting people on the playa. I'd like to encourage you to explore what others are doing and join a theme camp or village or just share what's going on with yours on our interactive web interface.