(Alejandro’s real-life son) plays Jaime, Alejandro's father. He forces his son to inhabit the persona of the grandfather who once caused so much pain.

The most poignant arc in both the book and film belongs to Jaime, the father. In Jodorowsky's reimagining, Jaime embarks on a doomed, heroic quest to assassinate the Chilean dictator Carlos Ibáñez del Campo. Through a series of brutal trials—including the loss of the use of his hands and a bout of debilitating disease—Jaime's fierce ego is completely stripped away. He returns home broken but spiritually awakened, finally able to show tenderness. Through this narrative choice, Alejandro actively uses art to forgive his real-world father, rewriting ancestral trauma into a story of redemption. 2. The Body as a Canvas of Suffering and Joy

The belief that art should not be merely aesthetic, but functional—capable of healing the artist and the audience.

The film’s climax crystallizes its central theme of reconciliation. After his failed assassination attempt, a broken and defeated Jaime returns to Tocopilla. In a scene of profound, bizarre tenderness, he apologizes to the townspeople, his wife, and his son. He admits his failures not as a revolutionary, but as a father. The father who once terrorized his son with brutality now bows before him, kissing his feet and asking for forgiveness. This is not a realistic depiction of a family reconciliation; it is a psychomagical act performed on film, designed to heal not only the wounds of the director but also those of the actors and, crucially, the audience.

For those familiar with Jodorowsky’s therapeutic system, Psychomagic , the film is a manual. Psychomagic posits that psychological trauma cannot be healed by talking about it; it must be healed by symbolic acts. La Danza de la Realidad is the ultimate psychomagical act. By casting his 70-year-old son to play his abusive father, and by literally re-enacting his own birth, his own beatings, and his own salvation, Jodorowsky is not just remembering the past—he is rewriting it.

The work remains a textbook example of how personal trauma can be weaponized into high art, challenging audiences to look at their own pasts not as a prison sentence, but as a mythic dance waiting to be choreographed.

This aesthetic is a deliberate departure from realism. Jodorowsky has argued that conventional cinematic realism is simply a set of conventions that help the audience feel comfortable. Instead, his work uses metaphor as its primary language. For him, as for Carl Jung, the unconscious does not speak in logic; it speaks in symbols and images. By bombarding the viewer with these potent, often shocking metaphors—a mother who sings her grief, a golden shower that cleanses, a fish genocide caused by a child throwing a stone—Jodorowsky bypasses the intellect and aims directly at the unconscious to provoke a cathartic experience.

: A central theme is that personal problems are often rooted in the "family tree". The narrative follows Jodorowsky's journey to cast off the psychological "phantoms" projected onto him by his parents.

La Danza de la Realidad is not merely a movie. It is a ritual. It is a 133-minute long psychomagical cure for the soul. Alejandro Jodorowsky, at 84 years old, looked into the abyss of his past—the poverty, the abuse, the terror of a Chilean mining town—and instead of falling, he danced.

The 2013 film adaptation of La Danza de la Realidad marked Jodorowsky’s return to cinema after a 23-year hiatus. It is a visually lavish, deeply personal film shot in his hometown of Tocopilla, Chile. Plot Summary

Before The Dance of Reality , Jodorowsky was celebrated as a pioneer of midnight movies. His films El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973) established him as a master of avant-garde cinema. However, financing difficulties and industry conflicts kept him away from the director's chair for over two decades.

For Jodorowsky, The Dance of Reality is not a conventional biography but an exercise in Psychomagic—a therapeutic framework he developed that uses metaphorical acts to heal psychological wounds. By casting his own son to play his abusive father, Jodorowsky actively restructures his family lineage, transforming ancestral trauma into art. The director himself appears on screen throughout the film, comforting his younger self and guiding the characters through their spiritual evolution. Stylistic and Aesthetic Elements

One of the most striking sequences involves a coup d'état, but it is depicted as a bizarre carnival. The film mocks the rigidity of ideology. The father, Jaime, represents the ultimate in rigid, atheistic materialism. It is only when he is stripped of his dignity and forced to confront the spiritual (represented by a sequence involving a church and a miracle) that he becomes human.

His mother, Sara, is depicted as a source of unyielding love, though she was deeply repressed by her husband.

You can render an image from the signature JSON text on the server. The following shows how to do this in .NET 4.5 C#, thanks to Daniel Knight. You would call this code as follows and it returns a base64 encoded byte array as a string:

GetBase64Png(jsonEncoding, width, height);

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Web.Script.Serialization;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Drawing.Imaging;
using System.IO;
using System.Web.Http;

public class GraphicsController : ApiController
{
	[HttpGet]
	[ActionName("GetBase64Png")]
	public string GetBase64Png([FromUri] string linesGraphicJSON, [FromUri] int width, [FromUri] int height)
	{
		return Draw2DLineGraphic(new JavaScriptSerializer().Deserialize<Signature>(linesGraphicJSON), width, height);
	}

	private string Draw2DLineGraphic(I2DLineGraphic lineGraphic, int width, int height)
	{
		//The png's bytes
		byte[] png = null;

		//Create the Bitmap set Width and height
		using (Bitmap b = new Bitmap(width, height))
		{
			using (Graphics g = Graphics.FromImage(b))
			{
				//Make sure the image is drawn Smoothly (this makes the pen lines look smoother)
				g.SmoothingMode = System.Drawing.Drawing2D.SmoothingMode.AntiAlias;

				//Set the background to white
				g.Clear(Color.White);

				//Create a pen to draw the signature with
				Pen pen = new Pen(Color.Black, 2);

				//Smooth out the pen, making it rounded
				pen.DashCap = System.Drawing.Drawing2D.DashCap.Round;

				//Last point a line finished at
				Point LastPoint = new Point();
				bool hasLastPoint = false;

				//Draw the signature on the bitmap
				foreach (List<List<double>> line in lineGraphic.lines)
				{
					foreach (List<double> point in line)
					{
						var x = (int)Math.Round(point[0]);
						var y = (int)Math.Round(point[1]);

						if (hasLastPoint)
						{
							g.DrawLine(pen, LastPoint, new Point(x, y));
						}

						LastPoint.X = x;
						LastPoint.Y = y;
						hasLastPoint = true;
					}
					hasLastPoint = false;
				}
			}

			//Convert the image to a png in memory
			using (MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream())
			{
				b.Save(stream, ImageFormat.Png);
				png = stream.ToArray();
			}
		}
		return Convert.ToBase64String(png);
	}

	public class Signature : I2DLineGraphic
	{
		public List<List<List<double>>> lines { get; set; }
	}

	interface I2DLineGraphic
	{
		List<List<List<double>>> lines { get; set; }
	}
}

A full list of all possible settings is shown below. Note that not all would apply in all cases. For more detail see the documentation reference page.

$(selector).signature({
	background: '#ffffff', // Colour of the background
	color: '#000000', // Colour of the signature
	thickness: 2, // Thickness of the lines
	guideline: false, // Add a guide line or not?
	guidelineColor: '#a0a0a0', // Guide line colour
	guidelineOffset: 25, // Guide line offset from the bottom
	guidelineIndent: 10, // Guide line indent from the edges
	// Error message when no canvas
	notAvailable: 'Your browser doesn\'t support signing',
	scale: 1, // A scaling factor for rendering the signature (only applies to redraws).
	syncField: null, // Selector for synchronised text field
	syncFormat: 'JSON', // The output respresentation: 'JSON' (default), 'SVG', 'PNG', 'JPEG'
	svgStyles: false, // True to use style attribute in SVG
	change: null // Callback when signature changed
});

$.kbw.signature.options // Access settings for all instances

$(selector).signature('option', settings) // Change the instance settings
$(selector).signature('option', name, value) // Change an instance setting

$(selector).signature('option') // Retrieve the instance settings
$(selector).signature('option', name) // Retrieve an instance setting

$(selector).signature('enable') // Enable the signature functionality
$(selector).signature('disable') // Disable the signature functionality

$(selector).signature('destroy') // Remove the signature functionality

$(selector).signature('clear') // Erase any signature
$(selector).signature('isEmpty') // Determine if there is no signature
$(selector).signature('toDataURL') // Convert the signature to an image in a data: URL
$(selector).signature('toJSON') // Convert the signature to JSON
$(selector).signature('toSVG') // Convert the signature to SVG
$(selector).signature('draw', sig) // Re-draw the signature from JSON, SVG, or a data: URL