ABSTRACT
In 1929 while studying in New York, the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca began revising his ideas about the Spanish folk music called cante jondo. Rather than continuing to support its representation as a collective and “impersonal” Spanish musical form, Lorca began to describe cante jondo as a performative activity that, in fact, depended on individual performers “and their search for the spirit known as duende.”2 While it is unclear to what degree the cultural effects of the Harlem renaissance shaped Lorca’s thinking, we do know that by 1933, the year of his lecture “Play and Theory of the Duende,” Lorca was imagining duende as a mode of performance that had personal, social, political and religious stakes. In the lecture from which the epigraph is taken, Lorca speaks of a performance that overflows expected patterns and brings one close to the troubling realities of death and ambivalence. Having asked “where is the duende?” he answers, “through the empty arch comes a wind, a mental wind blowing relentlessly over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents; a wind that smells of baby’s spittle, crushed grass, and jellyfish veil, announcing the constant baptism of newly created things.”3 Duende evinces (and elicits) the irresistible imperative to be simply more than one can. It is, ultimately, the impulse to give and thereby expend the self, rather than merely consume. Duende is an unapologetic and fierce mode of
performative representation, one that cannot stop with individual discomfort. Indeed, fear, disease, trauma, and ambivalence provide the compass to Duende’s force, drawing and directing its agonizing activity.
