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ABC Brifigs The Spirit of Bur pi fig Map to Atheps
S meLLs of a campfire coasted through
the trees on the crisp fall air. The
scent synchronized with electronic
dance music that floated down a hid
den driveway about 10 miles outside of down
town Athens.
The wooded sanctuary glowed orange. The
burners lit up their combustible toys. The
anniversary burn was starting.
A little over a year ago, a group of fire-art
enthusiasts got together to build an Athens
"burner" community. And on the evening of
Nov. 2, they held a celebratory burn to denote
the Athens Burn Consortium's anniversary.
Russell Allen, Ken Daniel and Geary Smith
co-founded the group they call ABC a little
more than a year ago to bring Athens burners
together.
"I knew a lot of different people who had
been in the Burning Man community, or peo
ple who were doing flow arts that were kind of
disconnected," Russell said.
"There [are] so many good people with the
flow that live right here, how could we not try
to get them all together?" Smith added.
They chose the name to denote the group's
collaborative learning and teaching efforts.
"We called it ABC because we wanted to
keep it like the learning curve of teaching
each other and progressing the art of each
other's personal flow," Smith said. Coming up
with the "Athens Burn" part of the name was
easy. "I came up with consortium because I've
always liked that word," he said. "And it was
a perfect explanation of what we were doing,
too, because as a musician we would go to
consortiums and it was just basically free-form
jams... the same sort of thing with poi"???
flaming balls burners swing around on chains.
The term "burner" is used to identify
people who attend burns and adhere to the
10 principles of Burning Man, an annual event
that draws more than 50,000 people to Black
Rock Desert in Nevada.
Batfiifig Lessors
"A lot of people think it's just a bunch of
hippies out in the woods taking drugs and
stuff like that," Smith said. "And I'm sure that
may go on, but that's not what the whole
thing is about... it's more about the principles
of the Burning Man festival."
The 10 principles???radical inclusion,
radical self-reliance, radical self-expression,
communal effort, civic responsibility, gifting,
de-commodification, participation, immediacy
and leaving no trace???are the glue that holds
this community together. "We wanted to get
people together, in Athens, that were burners,
that adhered to the principles and enjoyed
partying together," Daniel said.
The overwhelming success of Burning
Man???and the event's now-limited number of
tickets???has spawned other regional burns
that occur all over the world. Georgia has
two regional burns, one in the fall called
"Alchemy" and another in the spring called
"Euphoria," both at Cherokee Farms in
LaFayette. In between these seasonal events,
burners tend to seek out other fire-minded
individuals in their area to practice their craft.
A burn's spiritual element is difficult to
quantify in words. It is basically a community
where artists entertain artists, a community
that will exist within a timespan of a few days
up to a week and then disappear. People from
all walks of life congregate to set up different
camps with different themes at a remote site,
usually deep in the wilderness, with the idea
of adding as much diversity as possible.
"It's important to me, I think more and
more as I get older, to find time to be in a
creative space, because it helps me in every
other aspect of my life, " Smith said. "Being
around so many of the other burners just
inspires you... it just drives me to want to do
better and better."
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