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.
The cast of my theatrical work Zaratustra (Mexico, 1976). From left to right, back row: Henry West (musician); Héctor Bonilla (actor);Mickey Salas (musician), with his son; Carlos Áncira (actor); IselaVega (actress); Jorge Luque (actor); and Álvaro Carcaño (actor), with his son. Front row: Luis Urías (musician); Brontis Jodorowsky; Valérie Trumblay (in her womb, Teo Jodorowsky); El Greñas (seller of programs for the play); Alejandro Jodorowsky with Axel Cristóbal Jodorowsky; and Susana Camini (actress), with her son.
I wondered, Would it be possible for the theater to dispense with the actors? And, Why not the audience? The theater building seemed limited, useless, outdated. A show could be created anywhere, on a bus, in a cemetery, in a tree. It was useless to interpret a character. The person acting — not an actor — should not be putting on a spectacle to escape from himself, but to reestablish contact with the mystery within. The theater ceased to be a distraction and became an instrument of self-knowledge. I replaced the creation of written works with what I called the “ephemeral.”
During the performance of Zaratustra in Mexico, with Fernando Arrabal and the Zen master Ejo Takata. Photo: Hermanos Mayo.
During a performance an actor should completely melt into the “character,” fooling himself and others with such mastery as to misplace his own “person” and become another, a character with concise limits, made from sheer imagination. In the ephemeral, the acting person should eliminate the personality and attempt to be the person he is playing. In everyday life so-called normal people walk around in disguise, playing a character that has been inculcated by family, by society, or that they themselves have fabricated: a mask of pretense and bluster. The mission of the ephemeral was to make the individual cease to play a character in front of other characters, and ultimately to eliminate that character and suddenly become closer to the true person. This “other” who awakes amidst the euphoria of free action is not a puppet made of lies, but a being with minor limitations. The ephemeral act leads to the whole, to the release of higher forces, to a state of grace.