Burning Man Spreads Its Flame

Correction Appended

Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Kate Lacey for The New York Times

BORN TO BE WILD: Members of the Black Label Bike Club ready to joust at a party in Brooklyn. The club wanted a scene less “soft and safe” than Burning Man.

THEY were all there: the shirtless guys in weird top hats walking around on stilts; women with unexercised buttocks spilling out of metallic hot pants; people in loincloths twirling fire. To anyone who has visited Burning Man, the arts festival in the Nevada desert now in its 16th year, the cast was instantly recognizable.

Except this party wasn't in the middle of the Black Rock Desert, with close to 40,000 alternative culture-vultures covered in dust.

It was a few blocks from Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall and the 101 Freeway in downtown Los Angeles.

An estimated 5,000 Burners, as festival-goers are known, gathered Oct. 14 for a "decompression" party. The purpose was to reconnect with friends last seen dancing in a pagan frenzy near neon-lighted art installations, before the ritual torching of the 40-foot effigy that gives the gathering its name.

A man dressed like a Goth minotaur whispered a password to Burners he deemed worthy of admitting to an after-party in a loft. "We want to preserve the vibe," said the man, called DJ Wolfie. "You know, so women can dance topless and not get harassed."

Part arts festival, part "Mad Max" encampment, Burning Man - as its ample coverage in the news media has described - attracts a mix of neo-hippies, robot hobbyists, tech billionaires (Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google have flown in by private plane) and even the occasional celebrity like Sting and Rosario Dawson. For a week ending on Labor Day, people try to break free from societal rules and conduct.

The event has grown each year, attracting 39,100 in its latest incarnation, up from 35,567 in 2005, according to Andie Grace, a spokeswoman. Now many attendees are bringing the festival home.

Reunions like the one in Los Angeles have taken place in San Francisco; Portland, Ore.; Flagstaff, Ariz.; San Diego and New York, where last weekend an all-night party was held at 3rd Ward, a raw industrial space and rooftop in Brooklyn.

"There's pretty much some crazy Burning Man-type party every weekend," said Steve Ratti, an account manager at an advertising agency in New York, who started a Wednesday-night Burner happy hour, now held at the Continental bar in the East Village.

Lorin Ashton, a popular D.J. at the festival, said he is hired to spin about four nights a week at Burner-type events from North Carolina to Massachusetts. "It was really funny," he said, recalling recent dates he played in the Rockies in September. "I was at a saloon in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, called the Mangy Moose. I thought it would be all these wing nuts and redneck cowboys, but instead it was packed with all these freak-show Burners. It was the same thing in Missoula."

Burners insist it's more than the prospect of a good party that brings them back together; for many the festival, with its communitarian ethos and anticommercial philosophy (and in some cases its free-flowing drugs and spontaneous hookups), makes a lasting impression.

"People have a transformative experience and they can't go back to the old way of living," said Daniel Pinchbeck, an author who has written about Burning Man in books and magazine articles. "For me, going the first time was like the a-ha moment that people use to describe the first time they saw a Cubist painting or a Surrealist painting. It really changes ideas of what art is and what a community can do together."

Two years ago, the Burning Man organization set up an official regional network program to meet the demand for year-round gatherings. It offers advice on how to buy event insurance and an application process for official chapters representing the festival, of which there are about 65 around the world.

Regional chapters play host to camping trips, art exhibitions and loft parties, where people dress in costumes and refer to one another by their festival aliases. (Burning Man attendees are often christened with whimsical names, like Playa Barbie or Hot Sauce, which are supposed to make it easier to shed real-world identities and inhibitions.) One need only log onto Tribe.net, Burningman.com or local blog lists like Nonsense or the Squid List to track the coordinates of the many gatherings.

In New York, there are events influenced by Burning Man at the Madagascar Institute and Rubulad, alternative arts spaces in Brooklyn, as well as roving parties held by communities of people who bonded by staying at the same desert campsites, often elaborately constructed, at the festival. One clan, Disorient, was founded by a group that included the artist Leo Villareal and Nicholas Butterworth, an Internet impresario. "I'm happy to see Burning Man grow and bring that spirit into the culture," said Mr. Villareal, whose light sculptures have been exhibited at P.S. 1 and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

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Correction: Nov. 26, 2006

An article on Nov. 12 about the Burning Man arts festival in the Nevada desert referred incorrectly to a party on Oct. 14 in Los Angeles for attendees of previous festivals. It was not a fund-raiser for the national Burning Man organization. The article also misstated the height of an art installation at last year's festival designed by Arne Quinze. It was 50 feet tall, not 15 stories.

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