Wakarusa is a four-day-long music and arts festival located at Mulberry Mountain Campground in Ozark, Arkansas. This year, the festivities began June 4.
The festival has been around since 2004 and serves as a sanctuary from the default world for as many as 20,000 people each year.
I was invited by Venus in Flames, a performance troupe based in St. Louis to perform at Wakarusa as a fire spinner with the newly-coined Funky Art Recreation Tribe. The FART team (yes, this acronym is intentional) consisted of live painters, fire spinners, buskers and acrobats.
Canvases and boards were set up around the grounds where painters collaborated on the pieces throughout the entire festival. Buskers did everything from playing brass instruments to balancing flaming chairs. Fire spinners and acrobats manned a main stage fire circle after sunset.
Sara Glass, also known as the MissConception, was the ring leader of the FART team. She has been attending Wakarusa since the gathering was born. She became a flow artist through the burner community in Kansas City. Burner is another name for fire spinner or burn participant (think Burning Man).
Glass has made contributing to Wakarusa a priority since she first discovered it.
“There is just this level of creativity here that I don’t really see at a whole lot of festivals,” Glass says. “There is this camaraderie … this sense of wacky … anything is possible. One year, it was this horrible mud-fest and everybody was miserable. And all the easy ups that were ruined got dragged to this pile.”
Thankfully, there was no mud this year, with temperatures in the 90s all weekend.
Glass explains the word “Wakarusa,” the name of a river in Kansas, as translating to “ass deep.”
“That just so sums up the vibe here,” Glass says. “We are all just in it.”
Set up begins a week prior to the festival and ends a week after. Glass says she would like to see more burner principles represented at Wakarusa. There are 10 principles, one of which is “leave no trace,” which means everyone cleans up after themselves during the festival and personally hauls away their trash and recyclables at the end. It is a mentality which causes participants to think about the disposables they bring to the festival and is intended to encourage waste reduction overall.
One fire performance troupe that really stood out to me was ReCreation Studios, from Little Rock, Arkansas. They had everything from fire eating to stilt walking to partner acro. Each member demonstrated multi-prop mastery, great stage presence and professionalism. One member, Kyle Owen, who uses the pseudonym “Gibrusnoom,” says this is in part due to the studio they use in downtown Little Rock.
“The most important thing in flow arts for me is inspiration, the ability to inspire somebody,” Owen says. “And that should be your motive for performing and getting better. You should never compete with anybody but just compete with yourself, and make it a goal to inspire the person next to you rather than be better than them.”
Most flow artists discovered their passion through watching others. Sugar Bear, a lighting technician from Wichita, Kansas, says he was inspired at Interfuse, an annual burn held in Waynesville, Missouri.
“Watching them burn down a 30-foot Jabberwocky with 50 or 60 fire spinners around it … that is when I decided to start doing fire spinning,” Sugar Bear says. “I do poi, double nunchucks and fans. The chucks are the biggest crowd pleaser. Probably because I am moving them really fast and hitting myself with fire. I go ninja mode.”
Lewis Dodge said he began in 2011 after attending a show at the Skatium roller rink in St. Louis.
“It was just incredible,” Dodge says. “I had my mind blown by the three-beat weave (an artistic arm movement pattern) and just some basic stuff with glow sticks. I have been yo-yoing for five or six years. Flow is really just a dance with gravity. We are constrained by the laws of nature on this planet and we have learned to manipulate gravity by spinning these tools. I heard the other day that artwork decorates space and music decorates time.”
Levels of experience varied across the FART team. I have been doing flow arts since 2012, while some have been perfecting their craft for decades.
Peter Irish is a busker from Boulder, Colorado, and the winner of the Hacky Sack World Championships.
“When I was about 11 years old, I started,” he says. “I have been doing shows since 1993 full time. Since you were in diapers. I was probably doing this at Grateful Dead concerts.”
He now juggles hackey sacks with his feet and hands. He wears bars in his vintage Adidas to catch the large sacks. He also balances flaming chairs on his nose and juggles fire clubs.
Others came to Wakarusa to teach. Lee Jeffries, a six-time veteran, led the hoopdance workshop on Saturday. Unfortunately, his Friday workshop was canceled due to an eye injury in a glitter bomb incident.
He says he keeps coming back because of the family he has built here.
“When I first came here, I was a freshman in college just wanting to live out the experience, knowing it was a giant party,” Jeffries says. “Of course I was drinking, of course I was getting messed up. And I was enjoying that experience then, but I wasn’t actually looking at the benefits. Now returning six years later, I have grown an appreciation for it and it is a lifestyle.”
Wakarusa was truly a place where anything was possible. Astral Gypsies created several larger-than-life puppets which lit up and traipsed around the crowds. When I asked him why, member Justin Alexander said, “The driving force of this and all festivals is the creative inspiration — that little dream — which encourages us to work together and try new things. I think it is important for artists and festival-goers to realize it is what we build it.”