People are given permission to do virtually anything, and as a result, they start to become more themselves. And a lot of them explore being like this and they explore that, and you know, they want to know what colour they are, and what ... their origins are: who they are. So they explore and they paint themselves, and they dress differently, and they even act differently and loosen right up, because there doesn't seem to be any judgment on anyone doing anything. They can see people doing much more bizarre things than they'd ever dreamt of. And clearly no one's gonna look twice at you no matter what you try ... You have to be real good to gain attention around here. So you find people are allowed to be something else. (Gum)
Massage is popular - the Massage village being the principle locus for such sensuousity. There, various techniques - from Reiki to Tantric, and more idiosyncratic - are practised and reciprocated. ConFest has conventionally 'showcased' a plethora of tactile therapies and healing-arts.5 Sensuous communions may however, take highly erotic forms. The Queer, Pagan and Sexuality villages have been repositories for playshops providing the opportunity to explore 'flirting', 'gay flirting - with Shaun and Bazza', 'radical intimacy', 'polyfidelity', 'queer collaboration', bisexuality, Tantra, 'macrame and bondage - BYO rope'. Queer was host to numerous workshops and educational sessions on queer sexuality, cross-dressing and transsexuality - including those facilitated by self-designated 'queer-hippie' Nori May Welby. At Pagan, it was not unusual to witness a 'guy dressed in little leather pants whip himself over a woman lying on the ground in a pentagram in front of a small crowd of onlookers' (Baekia).
This festal 'banana time' is the realm of carnal possibility, a bacchanal 'coming out'. Cedar explains this well:
I remember walking from [a workshop on bisexuality] past the Massage village and there was this guy sucking off another guy just off the side of the path ... I couldn't believe it. I was stunned and amazed. I thought 'wow, this is fantastic' you know. Like people feel free to do that ... I've never seen it again at ConFest, but what got me was that there was room to be radically different.Such intemperate disinhibition may be even more 'public'. The celebrations at the Fire Circle adjacent the Market at Moama II over New Year present a pertinent example of Rabelaisian abandonment. The celebrations lasted well into the new year. Thousands of people, many nude, adorned with mud and paint participated in a percussion driven tumult well past midnight. We encircled a huge bonfire with an orchestra of the weird congregating at one end producing an incessant and often chaotic hand drum rhythm. There was an inner ring for wilder celebrants, primal voguers and temporary exhibitionists to circumambulate. It was an atmosphere where one was both exhibitionist and voyeur, actor and audience. Some performed stylised dance gestures (like belly dancing, Butoh, Capoeira). Others were just 'going off' - no longer an audience to themselves, some participants were in or near states of entrancement. Entertaining bravado, some younger males took to leaping the fire. Later, after hundreds remained to see in the dawn, a few 44 gallon drums became the main source of percussion (noise). Two women fell in passionate embrace in front of the 44s. They seemed oblivious to onlookers, one of whom was a disconsolate male who was previously mauling one of the now erotically engaged.
In conjunction with such proprietal dissolution and queer coalitions, there is much evidence of gender identity disruption. Male performance of femininity is encouraged and pronounced. According to Fulmar, at ConFest 'you can live out your fantasies ... I wore a dress for a while (why not?)'. Crossdressing is one6 overt indicator of the body's potential as 'a site of resistance'. For Grosz (1990:64), the body 'exerts a recalcitrance, and always entails the possibility of a counterstrategic reinscription, for it is capable of being self-marked, self-represented in alternative ways'. As Butler (1990:141) suggests, at sites 'outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality' such alternate gender configurations are enabled. At ConFest, 'disruptive' gender performances are made possible, in a space where divergence from rules governing sex, gender and desire is encouraged.7
Here is a promiscuous and disruptive topos, where 'the unclosed body of convexities and orifices intrud[es] onto and into other's personal space' (Shields 1990:57), where 'rival and subversive matrices of gender disorder' are made possible (Butler 1990:17). Evocative of the insurrectionary TAZ (The TAZ Bey 1991a), it surely is a most visible instance of society's 'orgiastic' substratum which licenses the profligation of sensual alterity in the 'transgression of imposed morality' (Maffesoli 1993:92).
Alterity
MacCannell holds that (1976:5) 'a basic theme in our civilisation ... [is] self discovery through a complex and sometimes arduous search for an Absolute Other'. Accordingly, an essential category of difference, typifying authenticity, is considered to be a source of self discovery (or even 'rediscovery') for contemporaries. This leads especially to tourism which, as Bauman argues, is a 'mode of life' in postmodernity:
The tourist is a conscious and systematic seeker of experience, of a new and different experience, of the experience of difference and novelty - as the joys of the familiar wear off and cease to allure. The tourists want to immerse themselves in a strange and bizarre element ... on condition, though, that it will not stick to the skin and thus can be shaken off whenever they wish. (Bauman 1996:29)I take this further by suggesting that states of social, psychological and cultural alterity are required for the (re)creation of identity. Othering is a requirement of selfhood. As ConFest demonstrates, one need not make pilgrimage to distant, international cultural productions to experience such othering. Of course, following Bauman's logic, one need not even travel so far as ConFest, yet the point I wish to make is that several pathways of alterity intersect at ConFest. I shall discuss regression (to childhood), alterant use, dressing down (nudity) and dressing up (indigeneity).
Story telling, singing and sharing circle, adventure playground, mysterious tunnel, parasol totem puppets, fabric printing, cubby shelters, face painting, procession, festival dragon, costumes, masks, music, follow the pied piper, join the frog circus, puppet theatre, arts and crafts tent, treasure trail - collect natural material. (from Walwa 90/91 handbook)
It would be erroneous to assume that all alterant usage is enacted with similar intent. For instance, LSD may be ingested for purely hedonic escapades, or as a sacramental tool for intentional spiritual transportation - to re-create or create anew consciousness. A common thread is that psychedelics can expand the boundary lines on the fields of possibility, potentiating self-transformation within a 'rave-safe' environment. Yet, there is an uncertain and random quality to the experience. In the only literary depiction of ConFest to date, Dando (1996) describes ConFest as a wild acid trip: the author and his friend were 'two feral goblins on acid ... we paint[ed] our faces tribal colours, became other people ... it's just like lord of the flies. It's chaos, anything could happen' (149). Isha recalls a young woman she knew who came to ConFest and, 'dropped a tab of acid and ... we didn't see her for days. Then I heard stories ... someone had seen her coming out of the bushes growling and snarling like a tiger. And she was a tiger for days'.
Well conceived and facilitated workshops can provide a safe environment to explore the consciousness enhancing, spiritual dimensions of psychedelic alterants. Kurt Svendsen, has, for instance, offered workshops which provide:
a gateway so that people so motivated to swim against the currents of mere sensory pleasure & entertainment could find a dignified clear-spot & exploratory oasis, a Meta-ConFest within the greater ConFest, a pure, albeit obscure Conferencing-Festival (Svendsen 1999:41).A report on one such workshop ('Conscious Tripping' at Moama III) provides an account of the 'half-life awakening of one individual into transpersonal or god-consciousness' (Professor Ceteris Paribus 1996). Another Psychedelics graduate relates that a subsequent workshop, an 'intense six-hour voyage of self-discovery' at Moama IV, 'opened the doors of perception into the world of the unknown within'. As an opportunity to discover 'some truths about good and evil', it stimulated 'a profound understanding of balance ... open[ing] a door to a higher level of compassion and feeling for other people' (Nagy c.1996). The 'bad trip' not withstanding, alterants have been known to amplify ConFest's catalytic capacity. Holding the firm belief that the event is nothing less than 'a catalyst for change', Mundarda, for instance, conceived his youngest child at ConFest during a 'psychedelic journey'.