Tribal Revival: West Coast Festival Culture
McGill University (CA)
Despite the advent of digital recording devices of every size and shape (read: camera phones), there have been not nearly enough attempts to adequately document in brilliant photography and text the electronic festival underground along the West Coast of North America. Though Burning Man is quite possibly one of the world’s largest if not most significant gatherings of freak culture and various media abound that render spectacular its participants, there are few attempts to portray such electronicultures in a thoughtful and insightful form. The same can be said for documentation of similar festivals up and down the left coast, from Shambhala in BC to Faerie Worlds in Oregon and Harmony Festival in Northern California. With Tribal Revival, something of this archival mission has succeeded, with 200 pages of colour photography documenting several years of festival culture and expression from the West Coast, circa 2002 through 2009.
Initiated by and featuring the exquisite photography of Kyer Wiltshire, Tribal Revival is split into three main sections, each introduced by an essay by the ever-intriguing Erik Davis, author of the seminal Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998) and a slew of other texts exploring alternative culture, music and technology. Davis opens the book by exploring what the festival means to its inhabitants:
Festivals can be a wild time, but for many participants the festival is also a vital space of cultural invention. Within the environs of the gathering, half sacred and half imagined, another possible world appears. Despite the variety of festivals and clans, certain values come to the fore: community over consumerism, the power of the feminine, the wisdom of consciousness exploration, and the ethical call to develop a hands-on harmony with the earth (24).
To this end, Wiltshire explores these themes in turn. Something of the book’s significance is also given some thought in the Introduction by Johnny Dwork, who as a “producer of neotribal festivals” speaks of the “magical vibe” inherent to collective creation of shared ritual experiences. Praising Kyer’s work—his touch and persuasion behind the lens—Dwork writes how the still images presented within present their “real-life subjects as mytho-poetic avatars...demigods that channel or embody certain creative muses that are beyond, greater than, and different from their everyday selves” (19). Though Dwork’s definition of mythopoetic differs from my own (he calls it “the quality of gracefully manifesting one’s spiritual potential”), it is precisely this axis of mythos, the creation of the imagined but nonetheless real, in its tangible effects and memory, and poeisis, the art of invention that strives beyond craft, the art of formative creation itself, that generates the means as well as, providing some insight into the ever-mutating ends of neotribal cultures.
The first section covers all manner of Avatars, from masks and garb to two subsections on the performance of collective virtual worlds and real dreams. Everything from full-page portraits of mudmen, faeries, goddesses to elven and imaginary creatures in their native environments grace these pages. Opening the second section, Play, is a double-page spread of a double rainbow above an ecstatic crowd at Burning Man in 2007. From here, winged performers, alien acrobats and otherworldly yogis begin to enter the frame, with a thoughtful section on festival Kids—the future of imaginative culture—followed by body blue performers playing with Hoops. Undoubtedly the next few pages will inspire many, focused as it is on Eros, with all manner of Burning Man’s erotic nighttime world on display, from cowboy cages to writhing fire-spinners. Indeed, nudity is so casual and accepted throughout this book that the particular emphasis on Eros as a section develops how the naked body is seen and enjoyed in different ways. My only comment on such nudity is that while female breasts are in, not enough images of the full body, male or female or otherwise, are depicted without some subtle censuring of the lower naughty bits. Save for one particularly interesting picture of a male BDSM performer in scrotum-stretching apparatus, there aren’t quite enough manbits to say that Kyer’s lens is an equalizer in this respect.
Kissing elves and naked, biking grannies follow, only to lead into one of the more difficult and intangible arts to capture, that of Music. But Wiltshire certainly does this well, as he does with all of his photographs of the ethereal and split-second motions of an evolving subject. While some images are portraits or set-up for the shot, many are evidently not, capturing in the freeze the motion of an organic and complex field of festival actors. Documentary photography is never easy, and night-time, dance-crazed, psychedelic inflected photography is often a complete mess. “You had to be there”, we all say. Wiltshire’s work overcomes the usual barriers to capturing the mass dance experience of interlocked enthusiasts, taking us into the heart of the dancefloor, as well as above it, able to see the intermingling bodies, visual projections, stage, speakers and lighting as the crowd nearly throngs off the page.
Not only humans grace the paper, as Wiltshire explores Live Art, a unique form of improvised visual art performance prominent at worldwide psychedelic music festivals, with artists using paint, airbrush, aerosol or other media to create work that often intends to capture the psychedelic state of the body’s energy patterns and chakra fields. Luminescent body-painting and airbrushing dovetails alongside creative uses of costume, with a few interesting pictures suggestive of steampunk subcultures.
The third and last section, Rite, ties together the underlying motivations that drive tens of thousands of participants to orientate their entire lives around alternative festivals. Composed of pages devoted to Prayer, Transformation, Fire, Goddess and the New Dawn, these pages try to combine all the preceding elements into a gestalt of the total experience of what Wiltshire calls “tribal revival”. In this sense, the outward manifestations of the tribe in movement and worship are depicted in photographs that both capture tidbits of detail—such as the shape of praying hands—to the mass, whirling formations of fire worship, desert sun salutations and ritual dance.
Throughout the book the informative words of Erik Davis offer an introductory commentary to the phenomena depicted, but also a persuasive one well worth reading as a scholar. For example, in the Fire section, Davis meditates upon how “Fire is the essence of the rite. All the other elements came to our ancestors ready to hand; only fire had to be tamed, or rather, since you can never tame it, fire was the original ally, the original pact” (172). Though Davis’ exuberance is perhaps a tad debatable—certainly agriculture, housing and irrigation, to name a few other elements transformed, also had to be tamed, as earth, air and water—Davis is right in focusing on how fire is a contemporary rite that has emerged from traditional practices only to be reinvented into a new connective force that expresses the intangible nature of the festival itself. Fire consumes itself; it destroys what it makes in its bright heat. And more so than the other elements, fire draws us all in, around the fire, to bear witness to its dangerous exuberance and to test our limits of control. In short, though it may be ancient in some ways and native to many cultures worldwide, in others the obsession with fire rituals and fire dancing is very much one born out of modernity’s demise (or whatever you’d like to call the latter end of the 20th century). That fire was used by fascist organisations in the early 20th century in their authoritarian rituals and is used today to symbolically demonstrate the continuing spirit of such mainstream events such as the Olympics (yes, the Nazis introduced the torch relay), demonstrates its inherent characteristic as a malleable element, an icon open to its neopagan reinvention. There is very much an ontology to the primal destructive/creative force of the flame; it is about, as Davis writes, “being with the fire”.
All of Tribal Revival bears forth similar conclusions: it is about being with the desert, with others, with the world in all its forms, and whether that be a flaming pirate ship in the desert or a prayer circle in the forest, it is about being with the full expression of our creative being on this planet that allows each of us to be without, to step outside of ourselves and become all that is other and alien to our humdrum existence, to be with others being without, including the upcoming generations, that marks all the potential of what post-EDMC culture and its variants has to offer.