The Arts: It has been called the world's most dangerous arts festival. But Burning Man is neither an arts festival nor dangerous, writes Brian Boyd

A friend went to the Burning Man festival a couple of years ago. When he got back from the Black Rock Desert, in Nevada, where the event is held each year, he announced that it made Glastonbury look like a Tupperware party. His experiences there made him leave a long-term relationship and a full-time job. He now writes bad poetry and pulls good pints on a Greek island.

"It can be a life-changing event," nods Larry Harvey, Burning Man's kindly 56-year-old founder and director, an incessant smoker and Stetson wearer. "People who attend find that they don't want to stop being in a particular state. . . . It's like a classic conversion: it can be life-changing. Marriages break up and people quit their jobs. There is a post-Burning Man syndrome out there."

Harvey is in Dublin to talk about a series of films being shown about the festival and to lend his weight to an informal network of Irish people who have gone through the experience - "the returnees".

For eight days at the beginning of each September more than 25,000 people each pay between $165 and $250 (€137-€207) to gather in the Black Rock Desert and, well, "resonate with their immediate experience". CNN calls Burning Man the most dangerous arts festival anywhere. But Burning Man is neither an arts festival nor dangerous. It's more of an anarcho-tribal-psychedelic-Dadaist type of thing. Yes, hallucinogenic pharmaceuticals can feature, but they are neither compulsory nor even necessary.

You can find drama, literature, performance art and all that jazz at Burning Man if you look for it, but you can avoid it also. The only real "event" that takes place during the eight days is when everyone gathers around a 50-foot man made of hay bales, chanting, "Burn the f***in' man, burn the f***in' man," before doing just that.

It all began in 1986 in San Francisco. Harvey had just been dumped by his girlfriend, so he and 20 friends went down to the beach and burnt an effigy of her new boyfriend. They returned the next year to burn the man again, with even more friends in tow. Over the years the event became so big that they had to move to the desert. The man can represent whatever you want it to represent. Just as long as it is well and truly burnt at the end.

"I sort of regret now telling people how it all started," says Harvey, "because for a long time people thought the event was all about being jilted, but really it has nothing to do with that. I see it more as being about the social isolation of the individual, the way society has just become little more than a vending machine.

"Our culture has become so commodified in every way, and we're strip-mining it. This all impoverishes the imagination. It struck me that while we can try to save the whales, or try to save the redwood trees, it's about time we tried to save ourselves. This postindustrial world is actually more toxic than those dark satanic mills."

There are two main aspects to participation, he says. "It is a challenge to everyone to express themselves and rely on themselves to a degree that is not normally encountered in one's day-to-day life. It really is a great survival challenge. This place in the desert is inimical to life, even to machines. There is more nothing than you have ever seen. And the temperature gets up to 110 degrees. If you get lost you can easily die in that sort of heat.

"As regards the expression, there is no dogma, no hierarchy, no nothing. We're not Procrustean; maybe we're just a bit Utopian. There are no rules about how one behaves or expresses oneself except for those to do with issues of health and safety. It is up to each participant to decide how they will contribute and what they will give."

One of Harvey's contributions is to be mayor of the makeshift city that is built each year for the festival. It is, of course, nothing like a normal city. There is, for example, nothing to buy or sell at Burning Man. All commerce is banned. People bring their own provisions, bartering for anything else they need.

Harvey finds it droll that people refer to Burning Man as a counter-cultural or underground event. "In the beginning kids used to tell their parents about us and then bring them along; now the parents are telling their kids about it. We tend to have a lot of family reunions. We do have bohemian roots, I suppose, but it's a very inclusive group that come. It's crass to refer to it as part of the counter-culture."

The festival is so inclusive that it is now a big date on the calendar for right-wing militias, which tune in to the event's vaguely anti-government, anti-everything feel.

"From traditional American cowboys to youngsters with piercings, we get everyone. And there's never been any problems except for the odd trust-fund kid gone bad. In terms of what different groupings want to express, there are quite tortured dialectics about the first amendment, freedom of speech. Generally, we're all up for radical self-expression, and if there are any problems over what this entails the group will mediate the dispute."

It is a surprise to find that local law officers have little to do at Burning Man. "We've developed a relationship with the county authorities," says Harvey. "Obviously, if they see the law being broken in front of their eyes they have to act. There have been some strenuous discussions over the years about the fourth amendment, which is about the unreasonable search and seizure of one's home without due reason - home in this case usually means a tent. Sometimes, though, the weird-looking man covered in green paint that they are trying to bust is actually a high-flying attorney."

Harvey and his committee deal severely with anyone who tries to gain commercially from Burning Man. "We reject all that. Over the years we've been offered large sums of money from alcohol companies looking to associate themselves with us. They must think we're some sort of frat party. We had an incident with MTV a while back: a producer rang and said, hey, you're just our demographic, can we make a programme about you? MTV actually wanted to arrive on the Saturday and leave on the Sunday. We told them they came for the whole eight days or for nothing.

"We're very protective of anybody who tries to sell footage from the event - we've some of the best intellectual-property lawyers in the world on our side. With MTV someone sold them on footage, and they planned to screen it against our wishes. Someone, though, who works at MTV and had been to Burning Man rang us and said, 'My bosses are such assholes they're planning to screen this footage,' so we got it stopped."

Harvey refers proudly to the Burning Man diaspora, informal gatherings of returnees in countries around the world. "People really don't want to let go of what they felt at the event. Often they find that life can be sterile for them when they return. For this reason a lot of them gather together during the year and hold their own events. It's all very spontaneous and organic. They have retreats, organise art exhibitions, go into the forest. . . .There's now a 12-month calendar of Burning Man-related events. All we ask is that people try to emulate us, not imitate us."

Of all the strange, funny and ironic things Harvey has heard over the years about Burning Man - and he's heard a lot - he singles out something he overheard at the event a few years ago. A group of teenagers were loudly complaining that Burning Man had lost its edge and wasn't as good as it used to be. "The worst thing about it now," said one young man, "is that they let anybody in."

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