BEAM 1.1/COMMUNITY DANCE

COMMUNITY DANCE

The 1998 Burning Man Festival drew 17,000+ to the flat expanse of lifeless terrain known as the Black Rock Desert - the "Playa" - in southern Nevada.

The weeklong event, which featured the overnight emergence of the largest city in the region, hundreds of theme camps, and an unusually artistic, technohip, futureprimitive demographic culminated on Sunday night with the Ritual of rituals: The Burn.

It was spectacular.

As the crowd circled the dwindling flames of the Man burning, the energy unfurled in a loosening spiral of altered states. Organizer Larry Harvey's pet project, the Nebulous Entity,  moved through the throngs, gathering the cacophony of voices into its digital vortex, feeding back the processed sounds, along with a call to follow...

From the distance members of the Nebulous procession could finally see the source of the laser beams. A shimmering saucer, about the size of the mythical Roswell craft, was armed with the latest Light-Amplification-through-Stimulated-Emission-of-Radiation gear, and manned by some of this sector's most accomplished beam-painters.

As the Entity drew closer, three giant screens came into view, video-animation-morphing-blendo forged by digital art shamen piloting the projections from computer cockpits behind the scenes. Already, bodies began to respond with kinetic awareness to the trance-beating soundstreams of DJ Lucas, a legend in the making from Amsterdam.

It was the Burning Man Community Dance.

At least a couple thousand got the vibe, brought on the dawn, celebrated the beginning of the end of this year's higher expedition. The communal journey into open play space, hypermind place, incubator of our future race - was over for now.

But then again, it lives on in everyone who made it all the way Out There, a small flame still burning deep In Here.