Once again back from shibari at Camp Cyberia, Burning Man, and now enjoying hot running water with life’s other little luxuries that we tend to take for granted. like espresso only a few feet’s stumble from bed. After ten days in the dust and heat, a real bathroom starts to become a dream especially since a design flaw in the DIY showers meant only three partially dysfunctional ones for around 100 people. However, I have a theory that Playa dust works as sun-screen and deodorant. The latter could, of course, just be a happy side effect of the alkaline Playa dust on the nasal passages (for the benefit of the Pershing County Police and DEA: Playa, not ‘play’, dust, OK?).
We had a pretty busy schedule as we were part of the early set-up crew, which meant setting off from Reno on Friday morning. This was without even time for the Circus Circus’s customary full American breakfast washed down with a Bloody Mary (sporting not just celery but also crispy bacon and marinated green beans). Unfortunately, that was two hours before the UPS drop-off shop, where our tent awaited, opened and even then we were running a couple of hours late, so no chance. Luckily, the old adage “The Playa provides” turned out to be true and a friend lent us a spare tent, albeit a lot more ‘cosy’ than our intended accommodation.
So we set off on the comfortable and relatively short, by American standards, drive to Gerlach, where we loaded 85 bicycles onto a trailer. This part of the trip paled into insignificance compared to the interminable wait to make it the two and a half miles from the road into Black Rock City. Once we picked up our tickets and found our site, the work begun, as all we had to call home was a patch of bare desert floor with a potable and a grey water tank. Over the next couple of days, we erected a massive shade structure, tents, a kitchen, built a dome for our workshops, assembled yurts, showers, our suspension frame, bike racks and tables, inflated furniture, hung lights and drapes…well, everything 100 people need for comfort and fun. Here’s the canteen, showing a small portion of the shade structure, in the photo below:
We ran workshops Monday to Friday for a couple of hours every day in the dome which, as last year, drew a large and enthusiastic crowd. Since, many had never come across shibari before, we placed an emphasis on the aspect most important to us: communication. Through simple exercises, which involved enough technique to make them fluid, it seems quite a lot of people ‘got it’, realising there is more to shibari that knots and pretty patterns.
As we had a suspension frame this year, we also did three nights of shows. These interludes for shows were shorter than we intended as by late on in the day we were pretty knackered after usually having partied the night before and a pretty full-on schedule during the day anyway. We’d hoped to get a few other performers to help out but, as is the way in BRC, the best laid plans get hijacked by some tangential event and time is a relative concept at best.
Anyway, here are a few pictures from Nina’s show. Unfortunately, she earned a 24 hour ban for posting them on Facebook. She forgot you can post toxic tits like Trump on Facebook but not harmless nipples 🙂 Talking of whom, here is my favourite Burning Man gift:
Anyway, onto more aesthetically pleasing things:
