Alejandro Jodorowsky - The Dance of Reality - A Psychomagical Autobiography

When Marcel Marceau arrived six months later, my theatrical destiny took off. The mime accepted me into his company after a minute examination, giving me a very minimal role to show me that even if I had been somebody in my country, I was still nobody in France. Little by little I gained his appreciation and eventually rose to the highest role he granted to a collaborator: holding the signs announcing his pantomimes. Thus I accompanied him on his tours through several countries. While my friend slept late, exhausted from the previous night’s performance, I would get up early and visit whatever teacher or sacred place I could find. Since I did not have the opportunity to realize my ideas, I decided to give them to Marceau. I wrote The Mask Maker, The Cage, The Heart Eater, The Samurai’s Sword, and Bip the China Salesman for him, pantomimes that would bring new energy to his career. Having decided that I did not want to grow old making mute gestures with makeup covering my wrinkles, I bade adieu to Marceau. Unemployed again and with a young wife to support, I had to take a job as a house painter.

In this dance of reality it happened that Julien, the head of the company, was a member of a group organized by Gurdjieff and his collaborator, the philosopher Amir Sufi. Painting an entire house with them on the outskirts of Paris became a mystical experience. The owner of the mansion, an obviously incapable pseudoaristocrat, claimed to be an abstract painter and sculptor. He made striking splotches on large canvases using a whip dipped in paint. As a sculptor, he made imprints of his buttocks in a mold and used them to manufacture plastic chairs. We dubbed him the Furious. His wife had beautiful green eyes, and Julien loved her. One night, as an exotic spectacle, the Furious invited us to dinner with him and his friends in a pavilion that was painted in gold, blue, and red — colors that, according to them, were worn by the kings of France. We drank a lot of wine. Possessed by a poetic furor, I improvised verses composed exclusively of insults. The guests were terrified and began to leave. When only we three painters remained, an out-of-control “workers’ trio,” our trembling hosts placed three bottles of wine in front of us and went upstairs to the mezzanine to sleep. After a while, filled with the euphoria of breaking down limits, I went into their bedroom and lay down between them, not even taking off my shoes. Before falling asleep, I penetrated the Furious’s wife, very briefly, as a way of saying good night.

Early in the morning, I left my snoring employers and went to work. The Furious arrived at noon, smiled at me, and set about painting his canvases with his whip as if nothing had happened. Julien, however, did not conceal his bad mood. He pointed to my abundant hair and growled, “With that artist’s mane, you’re not real to them. They take you for a fool. If you want to break down conventions, make yourself into a normal man, like us, so that you’ll learn to savor the consequences of your actions. These people are dangerous, the power is on their side; our lives are practically in their hands.” And straight away, brandishing a pair of scissors, he cut my hair almost down to the scalp. Then he sent me to clean up a ceiling covered with spider webs, knowing that I had a phobia of those creatures: “Neither the poor, nor any sentient beings, have the right to have phobias.” When I went to the bakery splattered with plaster and paint, my new look drew the attention of several well-dressed ladies. They desired me, taking me for a socially inferior man, while making a show of rejecting me. I realized that the world was composed not only of artists, who are a tiny minority, but also of millions of anonymous people, destined for oblivion. In those people beliefs, feelings, and desires took on strange forms. Something was wrong. My view of life was lamentable. I was not yet ready to accept life for what it was. I needed to take refuge in a theater, sleep and eat on stage, not read newspapers. and grow my hair back.

Just then, I was surprised to see a luxury car arrive, its seats covered in leopard skin. The chauffeur, wearing a blue Hollywood-style uniform, entered the house and inquired after me. I presented myself, covered in flecks of paint. “Monsieur Maurice Chevalier wants to speak with you.” I followed the chauffeur, stepped into the Rolls Royce, and found myself face-to-face with the famous singer, who at that time was already over seventy years old. “The impresario of your trio, Mr. Canetti, who is also my impresario, recommended you highly to me.” (While working with Marceau, I had made a foray into the music hall, directing a group of singers called the Three Horatios.) “I would like you to help me improve the gestures in my songs and put on a couple of comic pantomimes. I am returning to the stage after a long break, and I want to surprise the audience with new things. If you are a true artist and not a house painter, come with me.” I took a moment to say goodbye to Julien, Amir, and the owners of the house, who, open-mouthed, watched me depart for good.

For a month, the old celebrity came three times a week to my staff quarters, two meters wide by three meters long, where we rehearsed with great discipline. Canetti, for his part, told me a secret: “Chevalier is already passé. His success does not interest me; I believe it impossible. Instead, I know a great young musician, Michel Legrand: I’m going to take advantage of the show to launch him. I’m hiring a one-hundred-piece orchestra, something never seen before. It will be an absolute triumph. He’ll fill the Alhambra Theater. I’m asking you to accentuate his presence with your staging.”

I set up the hundred musicians on a wide staircase, forming a wall at the bottom, each wearing a suit of a different color in order to reproduce a painting by Paul Klee. Legrand was dressed in white. His arrangements of popular melodies were truly outstanding. But he, his hundred musicians, and the monumental sound of the instruments, were all overshadowed when the old man entered, dressed as a vagrant, with a red nose and a bottle of wine in hand, singing “Ma pomme.” It was a delirious success! So much so that the show, which had been expected to stay in theaters for a month, kept running for a year. The theater was renamed the Maurice Chevalier Alhambra. The singer rented an apartment across the street, so that every day he could look at the huge illuminated letters of his name.

From that moment on, I never ceased my theatrical and poetic activities. To relate everything I experienced during those years would be a subject for another book. Because Marceau’s sign holder had fallen ill he asked me, as a special favor, to replace him for the tour of Mexico. I did so. I fell in love with the country and stayed there, founding the Teatro de Vanguardia and putting on more than a hundred shows over the course of ten years. We worked with the greatest actresses and actors of the day; we premiered works by Strindberg, Samuel Beckett, Ionesco, Arrabal, Tardieu, Jarry, and Leonora Carrington, among many others, as well as the works of Mexican playwrights and my own works. We adapted Gogol, Nietzsche, Kafka, Wilhelm Reich, and a book by Eric Berne, Games People Play, which is still being performed today, thirty years later, and for which I had to assert myself, fight against censorship, and at one point even spend three days in jail. Some of my performances were shut down; at others, members of the extreme right wing stormed the theater, throwing bottles of acid. I had to flee in the dark, hidden in the back of a car, to avoid being lynched when my first film, Fando y Lis, premiered at the Acapulco Film Festival. Gradually, between successes, failures, scandals, and catastrophes, a profound moral crisis was demolishing the fanatical admiration I held for the theater. Theater, as a profession, is characterized by a display of those vices of character that people who are not artists do their absolute best to conceal. The egos of the actors are displayed in full view, without shame, without self-censorship, in their exaggerated narcissism. They are ambiguous, they are weak, they are heroic, they are traitors, they are faithful, they are stingy, they are generous. They fight for recognition; they want their name to be bigger than everyone else’s and to be at the top of the poster, over the title of the work. If they all earn the same salary, they demand that an envelope be slid into their pocket containing a few more dollars. They greet each other with great embraces but say horrible things about one another behind each other’s backs. They try desperately to get more lines; they steal the scene by stealthily calling attention to themselves. They are full of pride and vanity but also have no security in themselves, they want to be the center of attention, and they never stop competing, demanding to be seen, heard, and applauded at all times, even if they have to prostitute themselves in commercial advertisements. They only know how to talk about themselves, or about humanitarian problems such as a famine, epidemic, or genocide if they happen to be the lead promoters of some superficial solution. To increase their popularity they pass themselves off as devotees, tagging along with the pope or the Dalai Lama. All in all, they are adorable and disgusting, because they show in full daylight what their audience keeps hidden in darkness.