Thinking prompt #3: DUENDE

Hi Everyone,

I’ve been rereading a series of essays by Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca about duende, the magical force of inspiration that has animated great singers, dancers, and poets through the ages.

As García Lorca writes: “The duende … 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.’”

One of my favorite of the poet’s anecdotes is about an eighty-year-old woman who won a dance competition in Jerez de la Frontera against much younger contestants because of her unmistakable duende “sweeping the ground with its wings of rusty knives.”

Your thinking prompt (from García Lorca):

The duende’s arrival always means a radical change in forms. It brings to old planes unknown feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle …

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How can you invite duende into your work, risk its upheavals, its passionate uncertainties, to create something new and unexpected?

Abrazos (and Olé!),

Cristina