You can make your experience as much of a performance as you want :) This article is a pretty good description. This summary of 2012 is beautiful. But no matter how much people try to describe it, it's different every time and for every one. All I can say, it's worth going at least once :) Generally speaking though - you don't have to make a big art project, or even a small one, but the spirit of the thing kind of inspires people to share things - be it playing live music, or telling stories, or passing out candy, or bringing a truck full of alcohol and setting up a free bar in the middle of the desert, or riding around on a bicycle with an ice-cooler full of watermelons and sharing them with thirsty strangers, or teaching tango, or setting up a stage and holding a professional ballet performance, or anything at all really. People tend to want to share what they love.
Thanks for the links, the descriptions all say essentially the same thing.... it's indescribable, and unless you've been there you can't really know what it's like. I would like to one day attend. edit: Did you get to see that ballet live?
No, didn't get to see them live, only found out about them after the fact. That's the other thing about Burning Man, no matter how much you see, after you come back you see hundreds of photos from other people that make you go "holy shit, how did I miss that". Burning Man is a kind of a super-saturated solution of strange people, and crazy stuff crystallizes out of it all over the place :) You should try to come next year! 2013, here we go!