“Duende”
looks at the capacities of dance as form and expression through the spectrum of emotions. It draws knowledge and inspiration from the tradition and form of Flamenco by using its main parameters; singing, dancing, music and rhythm – to shape an explosive landscape of vast emotions and experiences. It further explores notions like togetherness, collectivity, and community which can be experienced in flamenco and is essential to the work.
With this project I want to embody and convey heightened emotional states through dancing, singing and playing. A sort of storytelling that evokes imagery,colors, textures and smells. A collective creation out of singular and personal stories, personal experience made into a collective experience. There is a desire to travel collectively with the audience. To go on a journey, together yet alone since things land differently in everyone.
Duende is a place of tension and release which simultaneously anticipates something coming as well as going away from that which has happened.
The process of the work implies introspection while the work itself is highly expressive in ways that can be cathartic, contemplative, life affirmative and with a sense of joie de vivre. It moves swiftly between dark and light, high and low – covering a broad spectrum of emotions.
The piece asks the performers to expose themselves not merely as subjects but also as matter and beings by lending themselves to the dances and songs to convey emotions and stories. It’s not about personalities per se, it’s about core universal feelings and what it is to exist.
Duende explores the relation and the discrepancies between the personal and the collective and the personal and the political. It’s a practice of tapping into emotions and of letting emotions move through and out of oneself.
Flamenco is an expression of diversity and heterogeneity and shows the magic that can occur when things get to mix, blend and morph into something entirely new. Duende marries a rigorous formalist approach with improvisation, spontaneity and expression and explores the potentiality of moving through form and abstraction as methods to carry and convey pure feelings.
We’re essentially re-claiming to be subjects in this world where self-commodification prevails. We are more than our “identity” more than a label or a product. We are flesh and blood, full of complexity, feelings, knowledge and experiences and we want to share a space where we can explore and expose what it is to exist, how it feels and how we navigate in this world.