Freaks and Fire: My Years at Playa Del Fuego

Bill Kennedy

My first experience of Playa Del Fuego (or any Burning Man event) was over the weekend of October 7-10, two years ago. Playa Del Fuego (PDF) is the Mid-Atlantic Regional Burning Man event that takes place twice a year in the spring and fall. The event has grown from twenty people camping for a night on Assateague Island in 1998 to more than eight hundred people over five days, on the private land of the Vietnam Veterans Motorcycle Club of Delaware. It’s a celebration of the spirit of creative expression, community, participation, and acrobatic exuberance on naked Slip 'n Slides.

The VVMC’s land in Odessa, Delaware does not seem, at first glance, the most likely place for such an event. It is comprised of several acres of grassy field bordered on one side by scattered trailers under a thick covering of trees dotted with magnificent motorcycles, and the other by a barbed wire fence. Just outside Odessa, it is a fairly secluded rural area. As you pull off the road into the gravel parking (with the VVMC sign always seemingly posting the same turkey shoot) you check in with the greeters, a group of volunteers who answer any questions you may have. You follow a gravel road through a clearing in the trees to come upon a mounted Vietnam medical helicopter, surrounded by tents and shade structures.

This is the first of five divisions of the large rectangular field where individual campers set up. As you follow the road along the tree line and trailers on the left, on the right is a chained-off flag pole, the area around it scattered with ashes of deceased motorcycling Vets, open-air showers with running hot water, a tin-roofed brick banquet hall, a pavilion, and more open field leading to a bandshell/stage for performances. The open field is where the burn and naked Slip 'n Slide takes place. Then there are areas for theme camps with more elaborate set-ups and sound systems. They are split up by a fenced-in barn and grazing area for a lone white stallion. When PDF first grew too large for the pony filled island of Assateague in 2001 and moved to the VVMC, they began burning an effigy of a horse; in 2005 the barn and stallion were added – not for PDF, although fitting.

During my first time at PDF, I knew six people in a sea of over six hundred freaks – people dressed and undressed in costumes, blinking lights, and body paint; campsites decorated as well, while sound systems blared a range of music from rock, world, to techno; with bubble machines, fire spinners, blinking lights, and flame throwers; not to mention fifty or so VV in motorcycle garb wandering around with little grins. I felt as out of place as the Vets, and wore the same curious grin. I stayed with Camp Blunt, named after a theater company not a cigar stuffed with marijuana. I helped set up the camp and met some of the veterans (PDF not Vietnam).

While “participating” constructively, our camp’s founder laid out that the general weirdness was embedded in the “spirit of radical self-expression,” and that as far out as some of these people seemed, they were, for the most part, normal. He also said that PDF, like Burning Man, was an event of celebration and art, but PDF was still developing the art side while the celebration side was in full bloom. This year marked the first PDF that has allotted money from ticket-sales to create art grants. Until now individuals and camps created all the art out of their own bank accounts.

One camp, Plunderdome, had a large metal dome frame from which hung various stuffed animal “weapons” to be used in faux battles. Another camp, Gnome Camp, brought several garden gnomes with disposable cameras that were given up for temporary adoption over the weekend. At Camp 215 (Philly) I found an amazing performance artist, The Great Quentini, who put on a puppet show. With his head stuck through a stretched black sheet and with a miniature replica-body below his chin, he moved the arms and legs with sticks from behind. He then brought out a homemade percussion instrument constructed of twenty or so tins mounted on a stand and tied together with elastic. He began to play them with rubber tipped sticks in a random, slow, clamoring of crashes that developed into an intricate and fast-paced barrage of wonderfulness, holding the attention of some thirty lucky passerbyers. On Saturday they burned The Raven, a sculpture of a big black bird-form made by binding branches together, hung above the ground by a tripod of large branches.

On Sunday a group walks around with a megaphone announcing it was time for the naked Slip 'n Slide. All gather around a fifty-foot sheet of wet soapy plastic to watch around forty men and women playfully compete for such awards as "Most Difficult," "Most Creative," "Honorable Mention" and so on. On the end of the Slip 'n Slide are ten VV judges with scorecards in hand. At night they have “the burn,” where a pile of several hundred carefully stacked logs, a pyramid twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot wide and ten-foot high with a wooden sculpture of a stallion on top is paraded around by a series of fire performers dancing to live drums, before the whole stack is lit by a flame thrower.

I remember with clarity at the “peak” of this ritual, as people danced around the fire, the beautiful sound of bell-tones emanated in front of me. It was The Great Quentini, but with a different set of homemade percussions made of metal pans. As he played, I tuned into a conversation happening just over my shoulder between two British men. They were having a delightful chat about how each other’s respective schools were treating them, Harvard and Yale. I turned to see a skinny, pale punk rocker with a tall black Mohawk talking to a monkey puppet on the hand of a guy in a clown suit! FREAKS! I LOVE IT! I’m dancing around the fire! I’ve got blinking lights all over me! I’M A FREAK! I LOVE IT!

This past Memorial Day was my fifth PDF. Most of the faces I see at PDF are familiar staples to the event. Others walk around with curious grins. The art grants allot over $3,500 for projects. Participants can apply for no more than half of the total amount, and the grant should not pay for the total project but serve as a supplement for the shortfall. Artists have been given anywhere from $100 to $1550 for a single project. Two of the larger art grant installations this year were burnable art. The Fall of the House of Burner was a Dr. Seuss-ish looking house that was built to burn, but with the intent to coerce the structure to burn in a premeditated manner. I would totally live in this house were I a gnome. The Messenger was a twelve-foot tall marionette that spun fire and ultimately engulfed itself in its flames. The growth of PDF is more than just levels of attendance and decadence; its true growth is in the radical self-expression, community and participation that continue to evolve on all levels.

Experience PDF on video here.