The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography

by Alejandro Jodorowsky

  The performances continued. The audience filled the theater. My acting was getting better, causing more laughter and applause every time. On the day when a fan threw a bouquet of flowers to me, the lead actor once again called me into his dressing room.

  “I’m sorry, young namesake, you must come here no more. I will give you seven days. I have to replace you.”

  “But, Don Alejandro, the theater is full for every performance, I receive applause, good reviews, and all my jokes make them laugh.”

  “That’s the trouble. You stand out too much. You think only of yourself and not of the entire work, and I am the only one here who has the right to think of only himself. A wheel holds up an axle, nothing more. It is I who they come to see. Everything must revolve around me. Understand: I am taller than you, and taller than all the other actors. I only hire people shorter than me. And so I stand out. And that’s fair. When you enter a game, you must respect its rules or the referee will expel you from the court. You have been increasing the humor of your scenes. Since I have to maintain the overall balance, I have to struggle to outshine you in every performance. If this continues, I will have a heart attack soon. Look, boy, I became an actor mainly out of laziness: I do not like to work or make any great effort. Above all, I do not like fighting to defend what is mine . . . And don’t look at me like that, as if you think I’m an immense egotist. I don’t have to give you what I got with my own efforts, with no one helping me. The audience that comes to this place, which not by coincidence is called the Empire Theater, is mine and no one else’s. You don’t get to steal it from me, shielding yourself behind the hypocritical belief that because you are young the old winner should give you his secrets and hand over what he’s earned from a life of efforts. In any case, the people who come here correspond to my human and cultural level. They will never understand you: their ordinary taste will limit you. Go create your own world . . . if you can. You will have to shackle your inner child, which is afraid of investing and is constantly asking for things to be given to it.”

  “But Don Alejandro who will be able to replace me in seven days? In a certain way, of course second to you, I’m holding up the show.”

  “You’re naive, namesake. In my company, all are necessary but none is indispensable, except for me.”

  I received the lesson of my life: when I attended my replacement’s first performance, wearing a sarcastic smile, I saw that he was none other than the ex-boxer and injection assistant, grotesquely dressed in a costume that was a poor imitation of what I had created for my character. This clumsy man, with his disastrous diction, was more of a rock than an actor. Bathed in sweat, badly doing as best he could, he made me feel pity. I thought, “That’s it for this play. At the end, people are not going to clap; Flores will finally see what I contributed.” But to my surprise, the audience applauded with the same enthusiasm as always. The curtain went up and down seven times or more. The star of the show, with his long arms spread open amidst his modest supporting actors, received the usual ovations. El depravado Acuña finished up the season with a full house. I was reminded of a fable from Aesop: a mosquito comes and settles in the ear of an ox. It announces, “Here I am!” The ox continues plowing. After a while, the mosquito decides to leave. It announces, “I’m leaving!” The ox continues plowing.

  I tried to form my own theater company, but very soon lost enthusiasm. I realized I did not like theater that imitated reality. To my mind, that kind of art was a vulgar expression: trying to show something real actually recreated the most apparent and also the most vacuous dimension of the world as seen within a limited state of consciousness. This “realist theater” seemed to me to be uninterested in the dreamlike and magical dimension of existence, and I still believe today that generally speaking human behavior is motivated by unconscious forces, whatever the rational explanations they may attribute to them. The world is not homogenous, but is an amalgam of mysterious forces. Viewing reality as nothing more than immediate appearances betrays it. Thus, detesting this limited form of theater, I began to feel repulsion for the notion of authorship. I did not want to see my actors repeating a previously written text like parrots. Making them creators, rather than interpreters, required everything other than speaking: their feelings, desires, needs, and the gestures they made to express those things. I decided to form a silent theater company for which purpose I began studying the body, its relationship with space, and the expression of its emotions.

  I found that all emotions began with the fetal position—intense depression, extreme defense, hiding from the world—to arrive at what I called “the euphoric crucifix,” joy expressed with the trunk erect and arms spread out as if to embrace the infinite. Between these two positions was the full range of human emotions, just as all human language stood between a firmly closed mouth and a fully open mouth, just as everything from selfishness to generosity, from defense to surrender, existed between a closed fist and an open hand. The body was a living book. On the right side, ties with the father and his ancestors were expressed; on the left side, ties with the mother. In the feet was childhood. In the knees was the charismatic expression of male sexuality; in the hips, the expression of feminine sexual desire; in the neck, the will; in the chin, vanity. In the pelvis, courage or fear. In the solar plexus, joy or sadness . . . This is not the place to describe everything that I discovered during this epoch. To deepen this knowledge, I did what many do: I began teaching what I did not know. I started a silent theater class. And, while teaching, I learned a great deal. (Years later, I became convinced that the healer who is not sick cannot help his patient. In trying to heal another, one heals oneself.)

  My best student was an English teacher in a boys’ boarding school who had a monstrous but extraordinary physique. He was extremely thin, with a head that looked as if it had been crushed from the sides; even seen from the front, his face looked like a profile. His name was Daniel Emilfork. He had been an accomplished dancer. For sentimental reasons he had tried to commit suicide by jumping in front of a train; he had survived but lost the heel of one foot. No longer able to dance as he used to, for a few select admirers he would dance to Bach and Vivaldi records in his apartment, balancing on his good foot, moving his trunk, arms, and mutilated leg. Some friends took me to see him. I fell into ecstasy: here was the perfect actor for my silent theater. I suggested he collaborate with me. Daniel, earnestly melodramatic, told me, “I have suffered martyrdom beyond the stage. If you propose that I act in the manner you have described, you come as an angel to transform my life. I shall abandon the boarding school and dedicate myself body and soul to following your instructions. However, you must know that I’m a homosexual. I do not want any misunderstandings between us.”

  Around that time, the French film Children of Paradise had come to Chile. Seeing it, I realized I had invented something that had already existed for a long time: pantomime. I immediately christened the future group Teatro Mímico and started looking for beautiful young women to join the company while at the same time satisfying my sexual needs. At first, everything went very well. But after a while, I was astonished to find that the women stopped coming, one after another. I discovered with dismay that Daniel, apparently in love with me, was driving them away out of jealousy. I asked him to explain why what began as sweet wine should so quickly turn to vinegar; I ended up expelling him from the company. Emilfork, determined to continue his life in the theater, asked the directors of the theater school at the Catholic University to grant him an audition. They agreed to his urgent request, because the fame of his talent had spread across all cultural circles.

  The audition took place in the school’s small theater. There was a creaky wooden stage with burlap curtains in front of twenty seats. The directors, designers, and actors in this group were amateurs belonging to high society. They wore gray suits, ties, and their severely groomed hair shone. They told Emilfork to lie as if dead, and then, little by little, interpret the birth of life. My former friend, without
giving anyone time to stop him, stripped naked and fell to the floor. He remained as he had fallen. Still, like a stone, apparently not breathing. A minute passed, then two, five, ten, fifteen, it seemed as if Daniel would stay there forever as a corpse; the examiners begun to fidget in their seats. After twenty minutes they began whispering among themselves, fearing that the actor had suffered a heart attack. They were about to get up when a slight tremor began in Emilfork’s right foot, then grew more and more and spread throughout his body. His breathing, which had been unobservable, was now growing in volume and deepening until it became the gasping of a beast. Now Daniel, as if in an epileptic fit, dragged himself into each corner of the stage, uttering deafening howls. The energy that possessed him kept on increasing, seeming limitless. With flaming eyes and an erect penis, he now began to take huge leaps, climbing up the curtains, which soon broke free of their rods. Emilfork then shook the wooden walls that surrounded the stage. They shattered into pieces. Next, with incredible strength, he began unpinning the floorboards and waving them around as weapons. Then he jumped into the audience. The honorable members of the theater school fled, squeaking like mice, leaving the deranged actor locked inside. His screams were heard throughout the building for an hour. Then they died down. There was a long silence, followed by a few discrete footsteps inside the door. They opened it, trembling. Daniel Emilfork emerged, impeccably dressed, well groomed, calm, with his usual gestures like those of a Russian prince. He looked at the group from the heights of a profound contempt. “You bunch of ninnies, you’ll never know what life is, and so you won’t know what real theater is. You don’t deserve me. I withdraw my application for admission.” And he not only left the school, but he left Chile. He moved to France, never spoke Spanish again, and lived unceasingly in the world of theater and film, enduring innumerable privations until he finally achieved fame.

  We were all affected by Emilfork’s departure to France. Some of us, more than others, felt asphyxiated living in Santiago de Chile. Television was not yet fully commercialized, and one had the sensation that nothing new could happen in this city so far from Europe that was surrounded by a ring of mountains that felt like prison walls. There were always the same people, always the same streets. I knew that there were great mimes in France: Ettienne Decroux, Jean Louis Barrault, and above all, Marcel Marceau. If I wanted to improve my art I should do as Emilfork, drop everything and leave. But I had some very close ties that kept me there. First of all, there were my friends, girlfriends, and my commitments to the Teatro Mímico, which had already held some successful performances. Then there was my ambition to test the effectiveness of the poetic act on a large scale. Finally, deep down in the shadows, there was my desire to take revenge on my parents, to rub their faces in the suffering they had caused me through their lack of understanding. I discovered that rancor can be as constraining as love and entered into a foggy period during which I was unable to make decisions; a deep inertia had taken possession of my soul. I spent the days locked in my studio, reading. I excused this manner of killing time by telling myself that in order to know an author, one had to read all his works. At a forced pace I read everything by Kafka, Dostoyevsky, García Lorca, André Breton, H. G. Wells, Jack London, and oddly enough, Bernard Shaw.

  First reunion. From left to right: Daniel Emilfork, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Jacques Sternberg, the incendiary anarchist Fedorov, Fernando Arrabal, Topor, Lis (Arrabal’s wife), and Toyen (surrealist painter).

  One night my poet friends showed up, almost too drunk to stand, dressed in black and carrying a funeral wreath with my name on it. They lit candles and sat around me, pretending to cry while drinking even more wine. Reality was dancing again: at two in the morning, someone knocked frantically on the door. We opened it. My father walked in barefoot, waving a lamp.

  “Alejandro, our house burned down!”

  “The Matucana house?”

  “Yes, my house, your house, with the furniture, clothes, Raquel’s piano, everything!”

  “Oh, my writing!”

  “Fuck your writing! You’re thinking about some filthy sheets of paper and not my money that I kept in the shoe box in the closet, my stamp albums, twenty years’ worth of collecting, my cycling shoes, the porcelain your mother kept since we got married, you don’t have a heart, you don’t have anything, I don’t know who you are, we thought we’d come to sleep here, but this is a nest of drunks, we’ll go to a hotel!”

  And he grunted in exasperation while the poets, elated with the news, danced around. We took up a collection to rent three victorias. We made the journey to Matucana. The weary steps of the horses gave a metallic voice to the dying night. We improvised elegies to the burned house over the rhythm of the horseshoes.

  When we arrived, the fire was out. No one was there. Sandwiched between two ugly concrete buildings, my old home slept like a black bird. The poets got out of the carriages and danced in front of the remains, celebrating the end of one world and the rebirth of another. They dug through the rubble in search of the red worm into which the phoenix would have transformed itself. They found nothing but my mother’s blackened corset. Ah, poor Sara Felicidad! After all those years without exercise, spending ten hours a day behind the shop counter to the point that her elbows were covered with calluses from so much leaning on that hard surface, and also eating compulsively to compensate for the lack of love in her life, she had grown fat, lost her figure, and felt as if she was drowning beneath a magma of flesh, while my father, under the pretext of door-to-door sales, had become the “neighborhood Casanova,” riding his bicycle around, committing adultery left and right with female customers. In order to set herself limits that would reassure her that she was alive, that the world was governed by infallible laws, that she was not open like a river to the thirsty snout of any rapacious beast that might arrive, Sara had donned this corset, constructed of steel rods, which encased her from breasts to midthigh. The first thing she did when she awoke in the morning was to shout for the maid, who came grumbling as usual to help her to tie its laces. She exited her bedroom rigid but with form, her animal nature compressed, a self-confident lady feeling no shyness in front of the scrutinizing gaze of others. At night, returning from the shop with swollen feet and eyes reddened by the neon lights, she would again call the maid to help her out of this instrument of torture. This was done at a time when we should all have been in bed. I always knew that I would not be able to fall asleep immediately. My mother would begin scratching herself with her long fingernails, which were always painted red. Her skin, dry after so many hours of confinement because the canvas fabric of the corset prevented her from sweating, made an insidious, pervasive sound like paper ripping. The concert would last for half an hour. I knew from the maid’s gossiping that Sara soothed her itching from her neck to her knees by smearing herself with her own saliva. Her obesity, her elbow calluses, her swollen feet, her itching, were things that I always viewed with a kind of sarcasm, as if my mother were guilty of this ugliness, an ugliness that she had to hide in a corset. Now, watching the poets kicking around this blackened framework and giggling, I felt sad for her—poor woman, naively sacrificing her life simply due to lack of awareness. Her myopic husband, mother, stepfather, half-siblings, and cousins had been unable to see her glorious whiteness of body and soul. Punished as a child, considered an intruder even before her birth, given birth to apathetically, received into a cold cradle, she was a swan among proud ducks . . .

  Dawn was breaking. Reality resumed its dance. A man passed by selling red heart-shaped balloons. With a harsh shout, I stopped the poets’ soccer game. With my remaining money I paid the three carriage drivers and bought all the man’s red balloons. I tied the corset to the volatile bunch and released it. It rose up until it was just a small black spot in the middle of the rosy dawn sky. I compared this ascent to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. I started coughing and had to take a long drink. Perhaps it was then that I understood the close union that the subconscious forms betw
een people and their intimate objects. For me, releasing my mother’s corset, sending it high into the sky carried by heart-shaped balloons, was like setting her free from her daily imprisonment, her lackluster life as a shopkeeper’s wife, her sexual misery, the blinders of an unwanted fatherless child, and her absolute lack of love. I had spent all those years complaining about her lack of attention and tenderness to me, but I had been unable to give her the slightest bit of affection, blinded as I was by my own spite. As for her, a prisoner of her narrow consciousness, there was little I could give her. I offered my love to her corset, making it into an angel.

  The burned house seemed to send us a message that one world was ending and another was about to be born from the ruins. This event coincided with the end of winter and the beginning of spring. Realizing that no carnival had been held in Chile for more than twenty years, we set out to revive the Spring Festival. There were three of us who had this idea: Enrique Lihn; José Donoso, later well known as a novelist (The Obscene Bird of Night); and I. Every day at six in the evening, the time at which people left work and filled the streets, we went out in costumes in order to create collective enthusiasm. Lihn dressed as a thin, electric devil, wiggling like a scarlet noodle, waving his hard arrow-tipped tail, questioning passersby about their intimate depravities with an underhanded canniness. Donoso, dressed as a nymphomaniac, wearing black with two soccer balls as breasts, went around sensually assaulting men who escaped from his attacks amidst collective laughter. And I, dressed as Pierrot, in white from head to toe, exuding a universal loving sadness, would nestle in the arms of women in order that they might cradle me like a wounded child . . . Other poets and a group of college students followed our example, and soon a euphoric costume show was there for passersby to see every day in the city center. Some astute shopkeepers made the most of the idea and organized a dance at the National Stadium. It was an unprecedented success. The seats all filled up, and also the stands, and then the exterior grounds and adjacent streets. One million people danced, got drunk, and loved one another that night. We, the initial performers, had to pay admission like everyone else. Nobody thanked us. We had turned into part of the general anonymity. Disgusted, knowing that a bunch of businessmen had robbed us blind, we went to drown our sorrows at a bar near the Mapocho station, where we drank under the spell of the strident noise of the trains. We no longer had the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita: “Think of the work and not of the fruit.” We were annoyed that we had not been recognized. I learned years later from certain bodhisattvas to secretly bless everything within my view. That night we wanted to be congratulated: “Thanks to you, a marvelous celebration has been reborn. You deserve an award, a cup, a diploma, or at least a hug or free entry to all the festivities.” We got nothing, not even a smile. We decided to celebrate in the Mapuche style: we put the chairs on the table and sat on the floor with our legs crossed, forming a circle. We stopped talking, and each one of us drank with a funereal rhythm from his own bottle of rum until it was finished: one liter of alcohol per head. My friends crumpled in silence. I felt like I was dying. I was drowning in the excess of alcohol. I ran out into the street, threw up next to a street lamp, walked with my arms open to the sky, and finally sat down in the ditch at a solitary corner. The sadness of Pierrot began to invade me. Who was I? What was my purpose in life?