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Burner Podcast Presents

The Dispatcher

Essays, Meditations and Editorials on Burning and beyond

Tutu Tuesday!

4/26/2022

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Happy Tuesday!

In case you missed it, Tuesday is a Burner Holiday. It is celebrated across the Burnerverse by donning one of our culture’s most traditional and storied garments; the frothy and fabulous confection of frill known as the Tutu. Tutu Tuesday embodies some of the best things about Burning Man. Play, sparkles, butt cheeks and inclusivity. 

Invented in 1881 to expose and display the previously hidden ankles of ballet dancers, the tutu was born scandalous. It grew up at the end of the stiff and proper Victorian age, it’s fine netting made possible by advancements of the industrial revolution, and it’s style by the decline of moral virtue in the west. The first tutu was worn by Marie Taglioni dancing as the lead in the Paris Opera ballet’s production of “La Sylphide”. This was one of the first times a dancer had performed an entire ballet on pointe, and her father, who choreographed the ballet and approved the shortened skirt, wanted everyone to be able to see Marie’s intricate and impressive footwork. Some were scandalized, some tantalized, but the cloud like vision Marie presented quickly became the favored look for all Prima Donna Ballerinas. Within a decade, the tutu’s ankle revelations had moved up and over the knee, and were headed for the hipbone, changing ballet and front row seating forever. 

As with any new technology, the tutu was both wildly popular and unexpectedly perilous. By it’s nature it floated out and around the dancer, and was made of layers and layers of net and tulle which dancers often starched with water and flour and anything else they could think of to make the skirts stand out even more. At the time stage lights were actually gas lamps set up at the front of the stage. The flickering firelight was romantic and created a hypnotic shadow play of the dancers every move, something any burner who has seen a large art piece go up in flames can attest to. However, the fluttering dancers often brought their wick like skirts quite close to the audience, and from the mid to the late 1800’s, being a ballet dancer was one of the most dangerous professions available. There were so many tragic instances of ballerinas going up in flames that the King of France ordered dance costumes to be treated with flame retardant. Typical of most of the artists I know, many dancers refused the safety measures because the fire retardants of the time made the costumes dull and ugly. Beauty and Danger! Safety third. 
 
Over time the tutu seemed to settle down. Electric lighting ended the worry of burning to death for one’s art, and a more open minded society accepted even the shortest of dancing skirts. The tutu began to be seen in children’s wardrobes as a part of their make believe costumes. It may have seemed that the tutu was finished making history. Not So. Pride was coming.

Some of my favorite moments in life have taken place at a Pride parade. My first was in 2012, 42 years after the first Pride was celebrated in New York City to commemorate the infamous Stonewall riots. I remember being astonished and delighted at the sheer volume of human creativity in the streets. The Colors! The Costumes! There were people on stilts, acrobats handspringing down the street! There were babies in rainbow flags, and glamorous elders in glitter and velvet wheelchairs. I saw a boy in gold glitter booty shorts down on one knee proposing to another on top of a Freddie Mercury Float. Everyone seemed to be high on love. And there were Tutus Everywhere. The Pride community liberated the Tutu from it’s traditional gender norms. There were still dancing girls in rainbow tutus, but there were also biker dudes and fabulous Queens, eight year old boys and pink haired grandaddies. In some fundamental way, the tutu had become a part of insisting on radical self expression. It had joined the ranks of the joyful subversive.  

LQBTQ Activist Palav Patankar states “A pride march gets celebrated with colour, costumes, themes and sometimes dress codes that border on the bizarre. The idea is to highlight the fact that we as a human race have a natural tendency to judge and discriminate and hate people on the way people look, the colour of their skin, race and sexual orientation," he says. The Pride Parade is about challenging Culture, about opening the mind to how beautiful, hilarious, strange and ecstatic individual expression can be when it isn’t afraid. This is one of the fundamental pieces to Burning Man culture. On Playa, we get to see what we might be if we weren’t afraid. 
  
And so of course, in the natural order of things, one fine day, someone looked at a tutu and thought “This thing is Perfect for Burning Man.”  The tutu found itself riding along, in some overly stuffed suitcase bouncing down the track past Gerlach. Who can know who brought the first one into the dust? What we do know is that the Tutu met Burning Man and the rest is history. Today the tutu graces the hips of every kind of burner, showcasing hairy thighs, and bejewelled belly buttons alike, gleefully collaborating with each of us as we explore and celebrate the principles of participation, inclusion and radical self expression. 

In honor of Tutu Tuesday, Today I present you with several images of my favorite tutus, and invite you to share your favorite images or tutu memories in the comments below.




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Photo Credit Abby Youngs @organigirl
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photo credit Mark Fromson@Autobiographica
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photo credit Mark Fromson@Autobiographica

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Look! It's a Blogger!

3/31/2022

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Hey look! Burner Podcast has a blogger!


I'm Jenni Legend, your newly minted Lady of the Diatribe, Mistress of Fancy Words, and burning Dispatcher.  Arash and I have been brainstorming for weeks on what to call me. We still haven't come up with an entirely satisfactory title, but I like where this whole Mistress thing is going. 

I am very pleased to be here, and to be a part of something as creatively driven and community centered as Burner Podcast. Creative Community is a passion of mine. For me, there's nothing better than a tribe of funky geniuses doing cool shit together. 

While 
Burning Man as an event happens only once a year, Burning man as a collective is an ongoing global phenomenon with as many faces and facets as there are Burners. As the Burner Podcast so regularly and beautifully demonstrates, Burners do not spend their year idle, waiting for that thing in the desert to return. Rather, they are involved throughout the year in every kind of shenanigan imaginable.

A few weeks back, I had the privilege of checking out one manifestation of Our collective when I was invited to a meetup for the Boulder Burners. I'm new to Colorado, and in the wake of a pandemic, it had been a minute since 
I'd actually met anyone new in person. This meant I was nervous as we pulled up into a snowy parking space outside the aptly named Dark Horse Tavern. If I had had any doubt that we were in the right place, the two freaks standing under the halogen light of the front door in their fur and fishnet left no doubt. I felt a surge of unexpected glee at the sight. It has been too many moons since I have seen any of us in our traditional cultural attire. I waved at them furiously, like an idiot, and the one with the dreads and the eyeliner grinned back and tipped his hat at me. By the time I had gotten out of the truck and properly donned my playa coat, the two outliers had disappeared back inside. We followed them into the bar.

The Dark Horse Is an exquisite destination for a Burner Meetup. It is filled with old wooden staircases, surreal stained glass, tiny dusty hallways that lead mazelike into various rooms on various levels, many of them hosting their own unique little bar. There are remnants of what was once an indoor racetrack that I was told hosted Big Wheel tricycle races. It has an end of the world steampunk saloon aesthetic, if the saloon had been picked up by a tornado and dropped upside down in Oz. The ceiling is barely visible through the detritus of antiques and oddities nailed to it. I thought I saw a person up there. Upon closer inspection I discovered a naked pregnant mannequin smiling vacantly back at me next to a full sized authentic horseless carriage. As words will not do it justice, I have posted a few photos for the family viewing pleasure.

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The bar alone would have made my night, but what I was there for showed up around an upstairs corner on a balcony beneath a moose head. HUGS! Just as I had known I was in the right place upon seeing fishnet and fur, they knew me by the coat that I wore. I had never met anyone there before, but the moment they spotted me, fifteen people wanted to offer their names and their embraces. It was as sweet a homecoming as any on playa.
The Boulder Burners have been hosting meetups for some time, and most of the twenty to thirty people there were clearly well acquainted. After some casual conversations and the ordering of drinks and food, one of the organizers herded us into a loose circle and introduced herself as Shine. I have missed hearing our names. She asked us to each share our names and our passions. “Large scale art installations” was mentioned, along with “Deep Beats”, “Community Building”, “Well Dressed Mischief” and “Psychedelics for Psychotherapy” were all listed. Shine then offered a chance for people to discuss some of the projects that Boulder Burners are up to at present. There were several awesome things occurring within the community, but the one that really blew my mind is the Temple Build that’s in progress in Boulder.
   

The Boulder Burners are building a Temple in their hometown. It isn’t meant to be a playa installation; it will be built in Boulder and is specifically designed to help the community there process the grief and loss of the last few years. Here’s the description from their web site.

“The Temple of Tranquility project is a community-driven response to the collective traumas and grief experienced throughout the Boulder community following the tragic King Soopers shooting, the Covid-19 pandemic, the Marshall Fire, and associated challenges of the last two years. The Temple serves as a non-denominational space for contemplation and reverence. This setting for participatory experience is designed to foster community healing, personal expression, catharsis, and new beginnings.”

The idea of a temple for Boulder came into being when one of the Boulder Burners attended a Leadership Summit in San Francisco and watched a presentation from Catharsis on the Mall. In her words, “I thought it was super inspiring to see how our traditions actually translated to the default world and provided healing.” She began to discuss the idea of a temple with her team as a response to Covid and the divisive political environment we have all been living in. Then, in March of 2021, the King Soopers shooting happened, and it was the catalyst for turning the conversation into action.

Currently, the Project has secured a place for installation in one of the Boulder parks. For those of you, like me, who immediately want to get involved, the Project is looking for leadership help with grant opportunity research, volunteer coordination, local corporate outreach, crowdsourcing campaigns, temple guardians, and opening and closing event production. In addition, the Project is looking for creative ideas on how to translate the cathartic release of the temple into something other than fire, due to the community trauma from the recent Marshall Fire.

That last point; Creative Ideas on How to release the Temple without using fire, has been in my brain ever since. I've wondered about using water, or having people do the demolishing... nothing seems even close to what it is to watch the Temple burn. If you all have any thoughts on this, I'd love to read about it in the comments below. 


It's a funny thing, how much a few hours with kindred souls can feed a person. I spent much of the rest of the night at the Dark Horse in deep conversation with new friends, and marveling at how hungry I had been for the kind of contact that lets me remember my favorite parts of myself and of my tribe. It was my first Boulder Burners meetup, but it won't be my last. 

This is my first burner podcast blog... It won't be my last. 

Signing off, as Dame of Dispatch,

Jenni Legend

If you’re interested in knowing more about the Temple of Tranquility, you can check out all the happenings  at https://templeoftranquility.org/

and if you're a burner in the Boulder area, you should definitely come to the next Boulder Burner Meetup, you can find them at 
www.facebook.com/groups/155573458288262

​
 

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    Jenni Legend

    Mistress of Fancy Words,
    BurnerPodcast.com

    talk to jenni

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