Presented by Esmeralda Enrique
Spanish Dance Company
At the Fleck Dance Theatre
November 12-15, 2009

   Duende is a Spanish word with multiple connotations. It could mean spirit, charm, magnetism, and almost demonic channeling of darkness. When Federico Garcia Lorca used it, he meant a quality of danger, as well as an intimation of death. Tragedy and death hover all his major dramatic works, from Yerma to Blood Wedding to The House of Bernarda Alba. Love, pride, and destructive passion stir in the blood of his characters, for Lorca believed in emotion and poetry in gesture and action. In his poetry, marked by his use of the ballad form with surrealistic touches, Lorca went for unconventional uses of metaphor and syntax, yielding some startling insights into his themes and his own literary personality as a writer who fought against repressive forces in art and life. His Gypsy Ballads, for instance, use the gypsy as an emblem for natural man in conflict with the moral and cultural dictates of society, and the poems’ daring sexuality (including incest and homosexuality) represent an attempt to break free from repression. A socialist and a homosexual, Lorca knew full well that his own artistic, sexual, and political daring would come at a great price, and, indeed, he was murdered at the age of 38 by Nationalist soldiers in 1936 at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil. Lorca died believing wholeheartedly in duende, that mysterious condition that stems from dark urgings and that which no philosophy could explain clearly. So, duende was and is always a struggle, an earth force that comes from the ground up, as it were, making its way into man’s being. It is an existential attitude and a style. Lorca liked to quote an old guitarist who remarked: “The duende comes from inside, up from the very soles of the feet.” So, duende can find an expression in dance, especially flamenco, where the dancer expresses emotion and action with feet, torso, hands, and head, and where the most ecstatic expression can be formed only through the mediation of duende, which is something achieved very rarely and always unexpectedly.

   I have written all this merely as prologue to my reaction to Esmeralda Enrique’s latest creative enterprise, in collaboration with dancer Juan Ogalla, guitarist Jose Valle Fajardo “Chuscales”, and singer Jose Anillo. Hers is a daring project, almost invidious, for it tries to explore the moral, cultural, and spiritual personality of Lorca without narrative and wholly through flamenco music, song, and dance. Words, of course, are not necessary in dance, and Lorca does lend himself to powerful and poetic dance imagery, as Carlos Saura has shown in his superb flamenco film trilogy. But dance needs more than technique, more than will to realize duende. Enrique’s lengthy program (it runs two hours with intermission) is a spectacular confluence of flamenco forces. “Chuscales” and Anillo explore Lorca’s “dark root of the scream” through the former’s guitar and the latter’s husky and powerful voice, especially in “Quejio/Cry,” and Juan Ogalla seems to find duende in his very first solo “Jinete/Rider,” that looks and feels like a romantic border ballad brought to imitative life with plaintive melancholy yet daring pride by the dancer’s quick modulations of footwork that encompass virtuosic pivots, crosses, and body vibrato. In all his appearances, Ogalla is a one-man corps, giving the musicians and singer their cues for accompaniment, executing swift footwork without blurring his repertoire of stampings. Esmeralda, in concert with the magnificent Ilse Gudino and the excellent Pamela Cortes and Angel Del Sol, seems to move on Lorca’s unsilvered surface in “Madrugada/Early Morning.” Strong in movement, somber in mood, this piece evokes the harsh austerity of Bernarda Alba, with all four dancers displaying an admirable tension between restraint and release. In “Campana,” the trio of Cortes, Gudino, and Del Sol use their exotic yellow dresses and long ruffled trains as part of their dynamic choreography rather than as mere plumage in what is a dance of allegria. Esmeralda shines in her solo “Where The Soul Never Arrives,” beautifully costumed, beautifully executed, yet missing that ecstasy which is duende. The final number, a bright, almost ludic ensemble piece (“Pueblo”) with what looks like a game of musical chairs at some points, celebrates the joy of dance, but its connection with the spirit of Lorca is thin at the very best.

   In sum, then, instead of developed narrative or a synthesis of Lorca, there are phrases and nuances born in desire or longing, blossoming with mystery, and resulting in a melancholy of lost possibility or joy in the vitality of creativity. Whatever labyrinth that exists is inward, sounded and explored by broken or sustained cries of the singer, precious with sobs of the soul, eloquent with the dancers’ movements, their body’s bright instruments. This is not the Lorca of the stage, but it is something of his psyche transmuted by other artists’ creative pride, resignation, melancholy, and joy.

photos: Hamid Karimi

pic 1: Esmeralda Enrique

pic 2 (L-R): Angela Del Sol, Paloma Cortes, IIse Gudino

pic 3 (L-R): Female ensemble with Juan Ogalla


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