What lessons did you extract from your happenings?
I realized that many people carry an act inside, which ordinary conditions do not let them materialize. When someone is offered the concrete possibility and favorable circumstances to publicly express the act asleep inside him, it is very rare that the person hesitates. If I asked you what act you would like to carry out in public, I am sure that an answer would occur to you immediately, and if I brought together the favorable conditions for actualizing this expression, you would treasure participating in the game.
Okay. .
I’m going to give you some examples. In the 1960s, I founded a panic group in Mexico, not with actors and other artists, but with enthusiastic people in search of an authentic way to express themselves, far from conformity. I had obtained the main playground of San Carlos school. I proposed that my friends envision an act that they would like to carry out, and I would find the means to make it happen. The celebrated painter Manuel Felguérez joined the panic demonstration and decided to execute a chicken publicly and make an abstract painting with the animal’s guts and blood, while his wife, dressed in a nazi uniform, devoured a dozen chicken tacos at his side.
What a good show. . Really delicious. Are there more?
Hundreds! A young woman wanted to dance naked to African rhythms while a bearded man covered her body with shaving cream.
Another wanted to be a classical ballerina, with a tutu but without underwear, and urinate while interpreting Swan Lake.
An architectural student used a mannequin and hit it violently with an ax in its stomach and privates. Once the mannequin was destroyed, he took from its insides various casings of sausage and hundreds of crystal balls.
Another student appeared dressed as a math professor with a big bag full of eggs. As he recited his algebraic formulas, he broke one egg after the other on his forehead.
Another arrived with a tin bowl and several liters of milk. With a foot in the bowl, he began to recite a classic Mother’s Day poem while he emptied the milk over his head.
A woman with long blond hair, dressed in black stockings decorated with pearls on the ankles and walking with crutches, yelled at the top of her voice: “I’m innocent! I’m innocent!” while she took from between her breasts slices of raw meat and lanced them at the public. Then she sat in a child’s chair and a hairdresser completely shaved her head. In front of her was a baby carriage filled with doll heads of all sizes, without eyes or hair. Once shaved, the woman began to throw the heads at the public while screaming, “I am me! I am me!”
A young man wearing a tuxedo jacket pushed a bathtub covered by a towel toward the center of the stage. By its weight, one could guess it was full of liquid. He left the stage and returned carrying in his hands a young woman dressed as a bride. Without putting her down, he removed the towel from the tub. It was full of blood. Without letting go of the woman, he began to stroke her breasts, her crotch, and her legs, becoming more and more excited about submerging her in the blood. Then he started to rub her with a live viper while she sang an opera melody.
An exceedingly attractive woman, with the air of a Hollywood vampiress, wearing a long golden dress that clung to her body, appeared onstage with a pair of large scissors in her hands. Several dark-skinned men crawled toward her, each offering her an enormous banana, which she cut with her scissors roaring with laughter.
These are sufficient examples. One can see in these baroque descriptions a panoply of images. You speak in the first place of the therapeutic value of these acts. But isn’t there a risk of sinking into perversion?
In Mexico I was prohibited from carrying out in public acts that had openly sexual connotations. Since I did not want to have problems with the law, I exercised some control and excluded people whose acts could have been viewed as attacks on modesty. Likewise, I always tried to keep myself far from drugs. But, to be sure, censorship was only exercised in two cases. One day a lunatic was determined to eat a live dove onstage. His act produced a commotion. Some people fainted, and articles of protest appeared in the newspaper. But they couldn’t put me in jail, which would have happened had it been a sex scandal. Outside of sex, everything is permitted.
You speak of a limit imposed outside the country’s law. What would happen if this restriction did not exist?
In the United States it was common, in the framework of the happenings, to give oneself up to a kind of collective orgy in which the participants stroked themselves while smoking marijuana. I was invited on multiple occasions to this type of celebration in New York or in other places, but I always declined the invitation because I quickly realized that this way was a dead end. All of this finally translated into a kind of shifty pornography. Now, pornography is not constructive but destructive: under the appearance of liberty, what is really presented to us is another form of slavery.
Let’s go back to the story of the pepper and the butterfly. If the act is an action and not a reaction, where is the boundary between the releasing of monsters sleeping deeply inside us, with the consequent risk that they will devour us, and the conscious materialization of a liberating act?
This has to do with a subtle border, which is precisely where the danger of this type of practice is located. I was soon approached by people to whom pornography and vandalism constituted acts. I did not encourage them, because the experience of poetic acts had taught me to direct only positive things. However, it is very difficult to achieve the “positive,” that is to say, something that creates a feeling of life and of expansion; by the “negative” I mean “acts” that, when brought to the stage, create a feeling of death and destruction. The act itself implies connecting with the dark and violent, the unutterable and repressed, that we carry inside ourselves. As positive as it is, all acts carry a certain “negativity.”
What is important is that this destructive energy, which, when allowed to stagnate, eats at us from the inside, can release itself as a channeled and transformed expression. The alchemy of the successful act changes the darkness to light.
Your responsibility is, at the very least, overwhelming! Don’t you run the risk of playing the apprentice wizard?
Not anymore. I am not safe from all risks, because danger is part of life. If one wants to remain surrounded by his little world without questioning his function, it’s not worth it to try an act that entails risk! Better to stay at home watching television. But the work that I propose actually is founded on a lot of experience, experience that I did not have in that long-ago time of the happenings. Apart from that, it wasn’t my place to be a therapist. I was, first in the quality of an artist, a man of the theater in search of a total expression. As I explored this art form, I saw in it, in addition, therapeutic effects. It is necessary to restore this experience in context. That being said, I admit to having committed some failures during this time. For example, the public devouring of the dove seems to me today an all-around error, a purely destructive act. But I didn’t expect it! I did not imagine the man could manifest something like that. He had never stated to me that this was his intention. When I saw him arrive with this live animal, it had a strong impact on me, and I was overwhelmed. I recognize my insanity at that time. But, what can I do? One becomes wise only in measures, as he goes through his own insanity.
Was there a time when you felt afraid of losing control of an energy you had generated? Were there moments in which the ephemeral panic transformed into panic pure and simple?