While many in Hawaii have remained blissfully unaware of its existence, Burning Man, an annual, temporary “city” in the Nevada desert, has bloomed into an event with worldwide pull and influence. It will draw an estimated 60,000 attendees this year, including at least 100 from Hawaii.

Islanders attending the festival in Black Rock Desert, which opens Monday and runs through Sept. 4, include a techie who made his fortune in licensing video games, an intellectual property lawyer, a retired emergency room nurse, fire dancers, DJs, artists, students, contractors, engineers and musicians.

So what is Burning Man?

>> It’s a user-operated carnival, with the ticket buyers providing the entertainment, in costume.

>> It’s a festival of art, with installations that can take months to design and construct and cost tens of thousands of dollars.

>> It’s a reason to wear neon or tutus and dance all night to world-class DJs (this year including Crystal Method and Carl Cox), if you ask those drawn to Burning Man because it encourages flamboyant behavior, or what organizers call “radical self-expression.”

>> It’s a test of resourcefulness based on the principle of “radical self-reliance” that requires participants to pack all their own food, water and supplies, take out all their trash and leave the desert as they found it.

 While many in Hawaii have remained blissfully unaware of its existence, Burning Man, an annual, temporary “city” in the Nevada desert, has bloomed into an event with worldwide pull and influence. It will draw an estimated 60,000 attendees this year, including at least 100 from Hawaii.
Islanders attending the festival in Black Rock Desert, which opens Monday and runs through Sept. 4, include a techie who made his fortune in licensing video games, an intellectual property lawyer, a retired emergency room nurse, fire dancers, DJs, artists, students, contractors, engineers and musicians.

So what is Burning Man?

>> It’s a user-operated carnival, with the ticket buyers providing the entertainment, in costume.

>> It’s a festival of art, with installations that can take months to design and construct and cost tens of thousands of dollars.

>> It’s a reason to wear neon or tutus and dance all night to world-class DJs (this year including Crystal Method and Carl Cox), if you ask those drawn to Burning Man because it encourages flamboyant behavior, or what organizers call “radical self-expression.”

>> It’s a test of resourcefulness based on the principle of “radical self-reliance” that requires participants to pack all their own food, water and supplies, take out all their trash and leave the desert as they found it.

Electronic music, tribal-inspired fashion and a “maker” movement of working with hand tools and individual entrepreneurship, all of which were seeded by Burning Man, have gone on to influence global trends.

THE “MAN” in Burning Man is a giant figure that is burned on the Saturday before Labor Day each year. Organizers use money from ticket sales ($390 per person this year) to provide security, emergency medical care, portable toilets and a central shelter. Coffee and ice are sold by the organization. Aside from that, everything people encounter at Burning Man is provided by participants. The event is intentionally noncommercial, with no sponsors, logos or vendors.

“One of my favorite things is to watch the city come together,” said Oahu resident Mac Kaul, a retired emergency room nurse who’s called Fire Diva at Burning Man.
Kaul helps mind the “fire conclave” where the flame that lights the Man is kept, and also belongs to a crew that helps feed artists at the event.

“It’s hard work. It really is … but we make it,” she said. “It’s fun to see it build and appear and go away again.

“It’s like a sociology experiment. Here what you do directly impacts the thing.”

Kaul began attending Burning Man as a Nevada resident, then relocated to Hawaii. She now heads Ka Pilina Interactive Arts Society, a nonprofit Hawaii regional affiliate of Burning Man.

You may find members of Ka Pilina twirling fiery batons or monitoring fire safety at a weekly Fire Jam gathering at a Kakaako park. They’ll be part of a Hawaii fire troupe at Burning Man this year, as will DJ Miki Mayhem, who came to the Fire Jam on Aug. 16 to dance with flaming fans.

Mayhem’s been to Burning Man five times, and said she was “inspired beyond belief” by the gathering.

“Just the fact that everybody’s environmentally conscious … good to each other — it makes me feel there is hope for mankind after all,” she said.

THERE ARE as many different reasons for going to Burning Man as there are people in the camp, but those who attend often say they’ve been changed by the experience.

Count Honolulu attorney Bill Meyer among them. Born in Manhattan, he’s an intellectual-property attorney and partner in his law firm who’s served as a lobbyist, represented Disney and worked with the ABC hit series “Lost.” His clients include “creative people of all sorts,” he said.

“It really has affected me in subtle but profound ways. It sounds corny but I was somewhat transformed,” Meyer said thoughtfully.

He is heading back for a fourth consecutive year and is part of a theme camp called Tetreon, whose patron is Henk Rogers, chief of the Blue Planet Foundation in Hono­lulu and another repeat participant. Others who have attended include entertainer Eric Gilliom of the Barefoot Natives, Bill Wyland (the artist’s brother) and a former Navy SEAL who lives on Hawaii island.

Rogers licensed the video game Tetris and saw it become an international sensation. Camp Tetreon pays tribute to the game: Its landmark structure is a combined stage, sculpture and sound system that Meyer called “kick-ass.”

Rogers, who calls himself a “frustrated designer,” described it as a “40-foot-tall stack of Tetris blocks on scaffolding and wrapped in spandex,” with wings that are 36 feet long.

People can pull on ropes hanging from the wings to alter the contraption.

The attraction, for Rogers, is “extreme creativity for a lot of people,” he said of the Burning Man experience.

“Nobody is a bystander. Everyone is a participant. … So when you go there, you’re in a different kind of society for the time you’re there.

“Money is not a consideration. Basically, you’re judged by your contributions.”

Meyer echoed the observation: “Unfortunately, Burning Man has this reputation as being this drug-induced, wild sex orgy, but you’ll get there and you’ll see it’s not anything like that at all. … You’ll see the occasional person walking around unclothed, but very purposeful, successful, smart people attend this thing,” he said. “And when you see the sophistication of the artwork and the mutant vehicles (art cars), you’ll immediately recognize that these are not a bunch of drugged-out hippies. …

“One of the things you learn at Burning Man is how to deal with adversity and how to make do with a little, and that’s really an important part of learning to engineer around problems. … It encourages resourcefulness, and I think that probably helped me.”

Meyer makes his own T-shirts for Burning Man each year. One of the first said, “Let’s bring the Burn home.”

“If you can bring that zeitgeist back … to your job and your profession” — shared competency, resourcefulness, open-mindedness, community spirit — “then you’re getting your money’s worth, so to speak,” he said.

“There’s so much to see!”