John Berger on Duende

John Berger on Duende, from Confabulations:

https://harpers.org/archive/2015/02/some-notes-on-song/4/

Flamenco performers frequently talk about el duende. Duende is a quality, a resonance, that makes a performance unforgettable. It occurs when a performer is possessed, inhabited, by a force or compulsion coming from outside her or his own self. Duende is a ghost from the past. And it’s unforgettable because it visits the present in order to address the future. 

In the year 1933 the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca delivered a public lecture in Buenos Aires concerning the nature of duende. Three years later, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, he was shot by supporters of General Francisco Franco. Granada was García Lorca’s hometown. 

“All the arts,” he pronounced in his lecture, are capable of duende, but where it naturally creates most space, as in music, dance, and spoken poetry, the living flesh is needed to interpret them, since they have forms that are born and die, perpetually, and raise their contours above the precise present. . . . The duende works on the dancer’s body like wind on sand. It changes a girl, by magic power, into a lunar paralytic, or covers the cheeks of a broken old man, begging for alms in the wine shop, with adolescent blushes; gives a woman’s hair the odor of a midnight seaport; and at every instant works the arms with gestures that are the mothers of the dances of all the ages.