Cirque Bizerk
In a sense, Burning Man was one enormous circus. 40,000 people from cities all over the world lived together for one week like carnies–camped in trailers and buses and tents in a giant circular arrangement on a vast, flat carpet of dust that covered a lake 120 miles long by 30 miles wide. The carnies wore exotic costumes and rode around in art cars.
Burning Man was a giant circus. And then there was Cirque Bezerk.
I passed it early one morning while I was lazily bicycling around the Esplanade—a giant, one-ring circus tent and with ropes and pulleys dangling from poles planted in the dust out front where trapeze artists would perform. Of course, there was no placard announcing show times. In a community where no money changes hands, the incentive for marketing is missing. Things happen, and you catch them when you can.
There was a schedule, which we were given when we arrived at the gate. I was overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of trying to keep track of so many intriguing performances that were scheduled at all hours of the day and night. But one event was not in the program and word of it spread by rumor. Cirque Bezerk was performing one time only: 11 p.m. on Friday night.
Several Kava mates joined me on this adventure. As a price to be paid for this performance, we had to ride past the metamorphosis of a giant, metal, firebreathing dragon near our camp in order to have any chance of getting into Cirque Bezerk because the two events were scheduled only an hour apart. We passed a crowd of thousands at the dragon as we set out across the playa.
There was a long line outside the circus tent of spectators watching trapeze artists twirling flames as they performed on the wire. We managed to get close to the tent when suddenly the front walls of the tent rolled up. People were already inside seated in the bleachers. In a moment of chaos, people standing in line swarmed into the tent from every direction, and once inside, we were instructed silently with hand gestures to sit down, sit down, sit down until we were squeezed together on the playa dust. There was no carpet or covering of any sort. I was separated from my friends and surrounded entirely by strangers. We sat in very close proximity. I tried to assume half-forgotten yoga poses so that I would take up just enough space for my body and nothing more.
Out walked a tall, goulish figure wearing black and white makeup, an excruciating grin painted on his face. He was a thin man in a derby hat walking on tall stilts, and dangling from his hands was a marionette at the bottom of two long sets of strings. She was a thin woman wearing a tutu who was being jerked around by this jerk. Her face was contorted. She was crazy with rage as she tried to free herself from those flimsy strings. Eventually she broke loose, and danced wildly until she was recaptured and carried offstage by members of her troupe. Maybe she was crazy after all. Rather than feeling sympathy for her, I was conflicted about her fate.
As I squirmed in my tiny space on the dust, I watched one performance after another portray the extremes of psychological perversion. Another woman was yanked into the air on ropes while wearing a straitjacket. She fought viciously to free herself from her constraints. One performance was followed one another in the air as we watched from our cramped positions. Not a word was said. It was a grotesque ballet suspended from ropes and ribbons threaded through pulleys attached to poles at the top of the one-ring circus. A beefy man dressed in black climbed one pole unobtrusively, carrying a rope attached to a performer. Then he jumped to the ground as the performer soared into the air, lifted by the simplest of mechanical contraptions—two human beings joined by a rope and pulley.
Someone sat immediately behind me and from time to time I touched his or her knees. I was never quite able to turn around to see who sat behind me. A man sat to my left. To my right sat a lovely young woman, maybe 20. I squeezed my arms around my legs to hold them close, trying not to touch the woman, who might think me inappropriate if I were to prop my shoulder or leg against her smooth skin. As people came and went, I twisted my body this way and that to gain moments of relief. As long as I kept moving, my body did not become too tense, though I was never comfortable.
And so the circus continued for nearly two hours while the audience squirmed on the floor, prisoners of an unspoken pact of isolation and decorum, contorted by our inability to simply relax and trust one another in the act of watching a whole spectrum of contorted emotions played out by the performers in excruciating detail.
I have watched contortionists other times under the big top, and their emotions always seemed cool and contained while they performed impossible feats with their bodies. It seemed to be part of the act to display no emotion, but here at Cirque Bezerk all of those pent-up feelings of contortionists were played out before us. Nothing was cool or contained about any of the acts. Even the man on stilts, who seemed to be in control of his dancing prisoner, had that fierce grin.
Even in the bizarre context of Burning Man, an immense convention of carnies cavorting in the desert in the middle of the night while fire burned all around, Cirque Bezerk seemed almost too dark. We were all in this together, human beings trapped in our circumstances fighting to remain separate while pressed together, not quite able to free ourselves.
As I look back on that week of stimulation and entertainment, Cirque Bezerk lingers as a crater in my mind. It struck me like a meteor and left a ring of disturbance in the stagnant pools of my consciousness, where I conspire to remain separate. I want to go back to those edges of human expression and emotion, where I can explore the shadows that hide in the city. I want to be in the company of geniuses who have nothing especially significant to say.
