Hola
Welcome to From The Soles Of The Feet.
I’m a flamenco student based in London. I started this blog because I needed somewhere to put all my thoughts and feelings about flamenco.
The name of the blog comes from Lorca, writing about duende, which is what is present in truly great flamenco, and other arts and experiences. By great good luck (or, perhaps, mischief!) I got an enormous, staggeringly powerful hit of duende the first time I saw flamenco, and now I’m a junkie who hunts it.
“The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought.
I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say:
‘The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.’
Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation. Everything that has black sounds in it, has duende: that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain.”
If you are an expert, please look kindly on my stumbling attempts at getting inside this strange magic, and forgive the mistakes. I’m learning, but with flamenco I find the more I know, the more I know I don’t know. Something tells me this is going to be a long journey – but it’s too late now, it’s under my skin…
Well, I finally got around to reading the Lorca. In fact, because my singing lesson tonight was all about duende, though that wasn’t the original plan. Don’t know how this matches your flamenco work, but the past few weeks working with my voice have felt at times like a slow uncurling of a sleeping thing in the core of me. Last week, I was asked to try turning off my mind and the desire to control notes (like your steps?) in order to become a channel or a pipe, giving expression to the unexpressable and letting the song come through the soles of my feet, through the dome of my body, up my spine and out.
Of course, I thought of you and made the connection to flamenco. On hearing this, Howard leapt to his feet, shouted ‘aha’, rushed to his bookshelf and read me several passages from the same essay you cite at the start of your blog here. The part that really moved me (-memories of Blood Wedding… what a writer!):-
Then the “Girl with the Combs” got up like a woman possessed, her face blasted like a medieval weeper, tossed off a great glass of Cazalla at a single draught, like a potion of fire, and settled down to singing – without a voice, without breath, without nuance, throat aflame – but with duende ! She had contrived to annihilate all that was nonessential in song and make way for an angry and incandescent Duende, friend of sand-laden winds, so that everyone listening tore at his clothing almost in the same rhythm with which the West Indian negroes in their rites rend away their clothes, huddled in heaps before the image of Saint Barbara.
The “Girl with the Combs” had to mangle her voice because she knew there were discriminating folk about who asked not for form, but for the marrow of form – pure music spare enough to keep itself in the air. She had to deny her faculties and her security; that is to say, to turn out her Muse and keep vulnerable, so that her Duende might come and vouchsafe the hand-to-hand struggle. And then how she sang! Her voice feinted no longer; it jetted up like blood, ennobled by sorrow and sincerity, it opened up like ten fingers of a hand around the nailed feet of a Christ by Juan de Juni – tempestuous!
The arrival of the Duende always presupposes a radical change in all the forms as they existed on the old plane. It gives a sense of refreshment unknown until then, together with that quality of the just-opening rose, of the miraculous, which comes and instills an almost religious transport.
He says duende the root of all his teaching, and the reason he does what he does. At which point it all came together. So, we are parallel tracking. You with dance and me with song. Who knows where the path will lead, but what I’ve learned so far is that either it comes or it doesn’t. It’s capricious. It’s from elsewhere. And it’s certainly very important. So glad to have a traveling companion.
x