Last week Burners.me reported that the locally loved Dancetronauts’ rainbow-bright Strip Ship wouldn’t be allowed at Burning Man this year.
The fan-operated website reported that the space-themed party crew’s art car, which has traveled to the festival six times, would be banned from Burning Man and related events for a year for being too loud on the playa during the burn and for promoting a free album over the loudspeakers, a move that violated the art-music-lifestyle fest’s decommodification tenet, one of its 10 guiding principles. Burning Man representatives did not confirm the latter complaint.
The Dancetronauts' mobile spaceship lights up the sky.
“We’ve received a number of complaints from participants about the Dancetronauts vehicle since 2013—in fact more than any other vehicle on the playa,” Burning Man spokesman Jim Graham wrote in an email June 15. “We requested the Dancetronauts draft a plan for dealing with the issues, and they failed to do so. We informed them they would not be licensed to operate on the playa for 2015. Mutant Vehicle applications can be denied for not complying with the rules, and teams who are denied can try again the following year.”
Though Dancetronauts are still welcome without the ship, leader Phil Plastina says they’ll likely sit this year out and focus on upcoming appearances at Life Is Beautiful, X Fest in California and BaseCamp in Utah.
In a recent post, Burners.me suggests this solution to get the ship back on the Black Rock Desert:
“The only thing that happened was the Strip Ship was denied a Mutant Vehicle License for 2015,” the post reads. “They could drive their street-legal Strip Ship vehicle to Burning Man just as they do every year, join a camp in the 10 or 2 o’clock noisy zones, and throw as many parties as they want”—though they wouldn’t cruise around the playa.
No word yet on whether Burning Man has agreed to the compromise.
