The 100th burning of Will Shuster’s Zozobra was Phil Green Jr’s first time attending the Santa Fe tradition—and his first time visiting New Mexico, for that matter. Green attended as part of the drone show company Sky Elements team to oversee the unprecedented light display that accompanied the dazzling burning of Old Man Gloom on Aug. 30 2024.
Green, a design animation manager for the company, says he worked alongside members of Santa Fe Kiwanis, including Zozobra Event Chairman Ray Sandoval, to help storyboard the show, which employed 400 drones, and illuminated words such as “gloom,” “burn him” and Will Shuster’s signature across the night sky.
“We really wanted to embrace the culture of what’s been going on for the last 100 years,” Green told SFR before the show. “We didn’t want to take away any elements from what the tradition has been. We just wanted to enhance that with the drone effect…and tell that story with lights in the sky.”
That story began a little more than 100 years ago, when artist William Howard “Will” Shuster, Jr. had members of the “Los Cinco Pintores”—five painters who were part of Santa Fe’s art colony in the ‘20s—write down their woes to burn while they all hung out in the then-new La Fonda Hotel. Later that year, Shuster visited Mexico and saw the burning of an effigy as part of a Good Friday celebration. Both ideas were merged and Zozobra—a monster stuffed with gloom whose incineration signals the end of said suffering—was born in 1924.
Sandoval previously told SFR the Kiwanis—which inherited the tradition and Shuster’s specs for building Zozobra in 1964—spent the last decade planning, alongside community members, the ultimate tribute to its creator.
In addition to the drones, which nodded to a line in Shuster’s journals about “painting on the black sky,” the 100th burning included other firsts, such as original music for the ceremony leading into the burning. Composer and musician Ross Hamlin, who has played with the Zozobra band for the last several years, says he wrote one original piece after the end of the Decades Project leading up to the 100th, and approached Sandoval about composing more—ultimately writing four pieces for the show. Hamlin both conducted and played keyboards and electric guitar.
The music accompanies the actions—such as the Fire Dancer’s performance—and are intended to “get some darker tones going back in some gloomier and funkier and maybe stranger sounds,” Hamlin said, describing his compositions’ genre as “gloomfusion.”
Plenty of gloom piled up in the hours leading up to the burn. At the gloom table—where this writer volunteers each year—lines formed throughout the afternoon as people both wrote down their woes and brought both written and other materials for incineration. One young man dropped off clothing he described as his “wedding suit.” A stuffed unicorn also made its way into the gloom box. Stephen Stetson brought the medical records for Kate Shuster, Will Shuster Jr.,’s great-granddaughter, who died in July from cancer. This year’s 100th burning, he said, was the last event on Kate Shuster’s calendar. They were placed carefully at the base of Zozobra, shortly before the burn.
While down on the field, many of the glooms carried personal significance and many tears were shed, on the stage as the ceremony began, local officials had more global concerns on their minds.
“I put in the Supreme Court opinion about Trump immunity,” US Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, D-NM, told SFR. “I put in Mike Johnson’s elections as Speaker of the House…the attack on trans kids and their families…I put in the nomination of Trump. I have great faith that our love and our joy will burn up that kind of gloom. Santa Fe has always know that choosing love and choosing joy is the way to go.”
Santa Fe Kiwanis President Ned Harris noted early in the evening described the anniversary as “very, very celebratory” and said 2024 had also been a year of “enormous youth involvement” helping prepare for the show.
“There have always been kids who are involved,” he said. “There have always been Zozo fans, but this is now our kids who are taking almost leadership roles and becoming the next generation of stewards.” Harris said he was looking forward to the fireworks (which were amazing) and the drone show, but mostly to just being there. ”I this is such an amazing place for the community to come together and have a shared experience,” he said. “It’s the dispelling of gloom, but it’s also just having this experience together as a community.”
