A generation raised in the manicured calm of American suburbia went looking for something it couldn't name. In Los Angeles — the capital of manufactured dreams — they found it in performance art: raw, ritual, sometimes bloody, often absurd.

From the 1970s through the '90s, these artists staged rituals for a world that had lost its own. Dancing Around the Fire tells their story through the voices of those who lived it — the pioneers, provocateurs, and chroniclers of the movement — and asks what they were searching for, and what they found.