(Laughter.) There were extreme instances, but I believe them to have always been mysteriously protected. To see Jerry Lee Lewis burn his piano at the end of his concerts really affected me; this influenced me to set fire to a piano and to generate a panic movement in a theater. On another occasion, in the American center of Paris, during an ephemeral that made history, I had a basket full of vipers, which I planned to throw on the audience. Can you imagine the apocalypse that would have caused? But just as I was going to act, a kind of sixth sense warned me of the danger. I suddenly had the vision of a horrific panic, heart attacks, people trampled or crushed in the stampede for the exit. . It could have been a real catastrophe. .
Can you give me an example of an extreme happening that you value as an initiation?
At the time, I was very young and quite handsome. So, I had a few admirers. Four of them wanted to stage a strange show. In Mexico, it is customary to drink tequila with a kind of spicy tomato juice called sangrita. There are, therefore, always two bottles: one of tequila and one of sangrita. The young ladies came onstage to offer me a bottle of tequila, asking me to drink it. Once I had done it, a doctor came and extracted a bit of blood from each one of them. This blood was spilled in a glass that they presented to me saying: “Now drink the sangrita: drink the blood of your disciples.” For me this was a real shock. I went off on a long speech about bread, wine, supper, the Last Supper, all the while telling myself that since I had been so crazy as to organize these happenings, I would now have to face the consequences of my own acts. When I finally decided to drink the blood, it had coagulated! As creator of the ephemeral panic, it was impossible to draw back: I therefore had to not drink but eat the blood of my flock.
Beyond the outrageous or scandalous character of such experiences, they have value as initiation rites. They force you to go, if only for a moment, beyond attraction and repulsion, beyond cultural conditioning, beyond the criteria of beauty and of faith.
These women put me up against a wall, and I had to abandon speech and pure aesthetics. It was a lesson. I admit that these acts were not always conscientiously conducted and that they were part of this experimental period, but you have to get into the cage if you’re going to tame the tiger.
From the artistic point of view, these practices earned you a rather changed reputation.
The polemic was considerable. I received a lot of letters in which the dithyramb rubbed shoulders with an insult, even a threat. The world of Mexican theater found itself revolutionized. From Mexico, I came to Paris, where this extraordinary Central American happening took place.
Maybe you can talk to us about that, about the extent to which it was a kind of apotheosis for you, a convulsive act and purifier.
Yes, it was a grandiose party, a celebration where the forces of darkness emerged from the trap to fight out in the open with the forces of light, a battle between angels and beasts, a ritual saturated with insanity and with wisdom. . This panic show had been meticulously prepared. I had acquired certain experience, and nothing tempted me. The risks were assumed with full knowledge of the cause. Putting on this event, I was aware of heading toward a death, a rite of passage from which I would come out either destroyed or transformed. . For me, it was not about amusing myself by surrendering to a little intellectual masturbation in front of a select public. I didn’t care in the least about the avant-garde flights of fancy coming from the deteriorated brains of some self-satisfied pseudo-artists. I did not worry then, any more than I do now, about the little apprehensive “spirituality” milieu, or about the opinions of those perpetually frightened people who see refuge in a cheap junk nirvana in an effort to avoid facing the monstrosities of life, the daily panic dimension. . It was not a question of staging a nice little show whose audacity would be applauded in trendy reviews, but to question myself completely. I wanted to expose myself: to put life, death, madness, wisdom in a game and to undertake a kind of ritual sacrifice.
What happened?
The first part was based on creations by Topor, Arrabal, and Alain-Yves Leyaouanc. Topor gave me four drawings, which I staged with Graciela Martínez’s ballet company, with suits made of white fabric on which the artist himself drew, and figures carved in wood. That way the public could attend Topor’s ballet, which took place slowly on a black platform. It portrayed the stages of initiation of a very young girclass="underline" her first pair of stockings, brought in a little wheelbarrow by an elderly lady without legs; her first pair of shoes; her first bra (two Chaplinesque characters came throwing kicks on an enormous plaster breast, lifting up a cloud of dust); her first lipstick; her first jewelry. .
Arrabal entrusted me with a little four-page comedy: the story of a princess in love with a dog-faced prince who ends up by deception with a bull-faced prince. For this scene, I filled the stage with a thousand chicks chirping deafeningly. The princess masturbated a bullhorn until a stream of milk gushed out. To me, these first two parts constituted understanding the comic-poetic prologue of the “Sacramental Melodrama.” Some of the more well-known American Beat poets, like Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, attended the event. The latter was so impressed that he asked me for a written description of “Sacramental Melodrama” for his City Lights Journal, an article that would be preceded by a little explanatory preface. The simplest is to let you read this document, composed immediately after the event and published in San Francisco in 1966. It conveys all the craziness and the beauty of this ephemeral panic, better than my memory could today.
The goal of theater is to provoke accidents. Theater should be based on what has been called “errors”: ephemeral accidents. In accepting its ephemeral character, theater will discover what distinguishes it from other arts and consequently opens it to its own core. Other arts leave written pages, recordings, canvas, volumes: objective traces that time erases very slowly. Theater itself should not last even a day in the life of a man. Just born, it should immediately die. The only traces it will leave will be carved into the interior of human beings and will manifest in psychological changes. If the objective of other arts is to create oeuvres, the goal of theater is specifically to change man. If theater is not a life science, it cannot know how to be an art.
SACRAMENTAL MELODRAMA
A panic ephemeral presented May 24, 1965, at the Second Festival of Free expression in Paris
A scene from which all the twists, cords, pretenses, and decorations had been removed. In other words, a stage cleaned of all the refuse and triviality: nothing but naked walls.
Everything is painted white, including the floor.
A black automobile (in good condition); the windows are broken so it can shelter things, to be used like a dressing room, a place to rest, and so forth.
Two white boxes on which objects are arranged.
A butcher’s block, a hatchet.
A pot of oil boiling on an electric hot plate.
Before the curtain is raised, large quantities of incense are burned.
All the women are topless.
Two of them, spread out on the ground, are painted entirely in white.
Another woman, painted in black, is atop the roof of the black automobile. At her side, another, painted pink. Both have their feet in a basin of money. A woman dressed in a long silvery dress, her hair arranged in a half-moon, leans on two crutches. Her whole face is masked, including her nose and mouth. Two holes in the dress reveal her nipples; another reveals her pubic hair. She carries a large pair of silver scissors.