Dancing in the Streets: The Value of Collective Joy

Source: Pexels, Photo: Belle Co

I recently attended my first Burning Man, a cats-out-of-the-bag antidote to what in “Burner” circles is called the “default world”—ie the status quo—and a spectacular showcase of human creativity, self-expression, community, and celebration.

Part music-fest, amusement park, fringe festival, love parade, fertility rite, and bacchanal, it's a festival in honor of the id, that part of the human psyche Freud called “a cauldron of seething excitations,” and which includes our instincts, passions, pleasures, joys, longings, exuberances, and eroticisms.

With 80,000 people spread across two miles of ancient lakebed in remote Nevada, Burning Man propelled me into a more or less continual state of astonishment at the art installations, architectural wonders, eye-popping costumes, light shows, theme camps, flame-spitting art-cars followed by long comet tails of bicyclists, and since the BM ethos is participation, the endlessly creative ways people come up with to give their gifts to the community.

It's a visual feast, a creative and emotional spectacle, a gawk-fest, and a joyous and exhausting romp through the freedom of expression and the power of community.

When I asked my fellow Burners what they thought people came to Burning Man for, self transcendence topped the list. The hunger for a holiday from their everyday lives, and reconnection to something essential and transcendent in themselves, and a community of fellow seekers. And though you could undoubtedly level all manner of critique at Burning Man, and it would probably find a sticking place, the radical aliveness on display there makes it flat-out superior to many aspects of the default world.

Not the least of this is the opportunity to join with others in an unfettered display of what sociologist Emile Durkheim called “collective effervescence,” the passion or ecstasy induced by communal rites and raves, harvest festivals, ecstatic dances, drum circles, parades, healing rituals, religious ceremonies and rock concerts, which help create a sense of unity and community among people, provide a counterbalance to life’s dispiriting forces, and give them a grand and inclusive opportunity to express themselves.

Collective effervescence—which has sustained quite a hammer-blow during these pandemic years—is the sense of contagious euphoria, energy and belonging people feel when they come together in a group around a shared purpose or vision, whether it unfolds on a dance-floor, a protest march, a brainstorming session, or just hanging out with friends at happy hour. And in fact research published in the journal Ethology has shown that people laugh five times more when they’re with others than when they’re alone.

In a culture pressure-cooked by anxiety, fear, loneliness and divisiveness, with so many inhibitions on authenticity and self-expression, so much of our spiritedness driven in and locked down, it's almost a political act to give people an excuse to let their backbones slip, if “political” refers to the affairs of state, and the state of the body-politic is as wound up as it is. It’s not just entertainment and catharsis, but social action and community service.

To be fair, it can also be just the opposite. What’s called mob-mentality or “groupthink” happens when peer pressure, loyalty and conformity result in irrational or even dehumanizing behavior, as can happen in riots, cults, or certain corporate, political and military operations. In both cases, a certain slippage happens in people’s sense of individual identity, which can be either ecstatic or destructive. “Enthusiasm shares a border with fanaticism, and joy with hysteria,” says Kay Redfield Jamison in her book Exuberance: The Passion for Life. “Exuberance lives in uncomfortable proximity to mania.”

But whether our passionate public rituals are carnivalistic, musical, athletic, patriotic or religious, they’re fueled by what Barbara Ehrenreich in Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, calls “the spirit of increase,” of stretching life to the fullest, even to the transcendent, since they’re designed to induce the feeling of being part of something bigger than yourself, surrounded by the larger hive.

There’s a technical term for the process that leads to this quality of connection and elation. It’s called entrainment, the process by which many individuals synchronize their movements or activities, a rhythmic conformity that brings with it a deeply satisfying experience of boundary loss which, at its farther reaches, becomes ecstatic.

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Musicians call it the groove, soldiers call it lock-step, and scientists describe it by saying things like, “A slow recovery variable interacting with synaptic time scales to produce phase-locked solutions in networks of pulse-coupled neural relaxation oscillators” (which sounds like they need to get out of the lab more often). Similarly, two heart cells in a petri dish will synchronize with each other over time, as will menstrual cycles in a sorority house and pendulum clocks in a room.

Entrainment speaks to a kind of force-field, a co-respondence that can be generated between and among people without a word being spoken. And it highlights that there are forces at work at events like Burning Man that are far subtler than anything participants will see in their selfies, far below the threshold of conscious awareness, at the level of the unseen influences that operate in the universe—electromagnetism, gravity, attraction, the binding forces and deep structuralities that hold nature and the cosmos together—forces you can’t see, though you can see what they do.

These forces, and the hunger to partake of them, are also a primordial part of us. Paleolithic cave paintings from places as far-flung as Africa, Australia, Egypt and India, show portraits of conga lines, of figures who are presumed to be dancing because their postures resemble no recognizably utilitarian activity like hunting or farming—their arms high in the air, their hands held in a circle, their bodies leaping, their hair standing out from their heads as if in a stiff breeze.

And to this day, we're still possessed of the ever-renewing urge to transcend the default world, elevate ourselves both spiritually and carnally, intensify life (both separately and together), and know ecstasy as an experience and not just a drug.

When performance artist Nina Wise asks students what brings them to her improv classes, they talk of something missing in their lives, a longing to rekindle the spirit of self-expression, spontaneity and play—the turbines of creativity. They want to lift the lids they’ve clamped over their lives, beneath which are great balls of fire—energy, emotions, expressiveness, passion, participation, contribution.

What they’re ultimately after, she says, is “delivering the truth.” And whether we deliver it through words, images or sounds, through art, innovation or improvisation, and whether we do this individually or communally, we release the heat of the spirit and say Yes to what wants to emerge in our lives.

But we also express ourselves in order to make contact, because we don’t just want authenticity, we want to be seen and heard and felt and known—witnessed. And in a sense the circuit isn’t complete until you share your energy with others. It's part of being the pack animals and tribal members we are, and being of service. Which is why it’s so important not to keep your passions just a tidy little secret between you and yourself, hunching over them protectively as if they were tremulous candle flames always in danger of being blown out, but instead to let them fan out into the world and into the lives of others who, just maybe, could use the illumination themselves.

“Light yourself on fire with passion,” said theologian John Wesley, “and people will come from miles around to watch you burn.”