One sort of reaction to art is cerebral, the pose of a hand scratching the chin, a half-interested “hmmm”, before a comment such as, “You know, Michel Foucault said of the post-structuralist moment…”
Duende is the opposite of that. It’s is the feeling of combined emotional and physical arousal people get when they are swept up in the feeling of an artistic performance. Traditionally associated with flamenco, duende is the kind of hot feeling that comes from being pulled into art. It’s thrilling, but a little bit frightening too. It’s something that may be felt either by the artist or by a witness to art, compelling us to say yes, and jump in before we really know what we’re getting into.
There is a sense of being possessed in the emotion of duende. The word duende itself comes from a character out of the folklore of Spain and its colonies around the world. The duende is something like a brownie, a small, mischievous creature originally associated with mysterious household phenomena.
In some places, the duende is said to lure people into the wilderness and get them lost. In other places, the duende is supposed to help people who are lost to find their way again. As an aesthetic experience, duende makes us both lost and found, causing us to leave behind the mundane mechanical world, taking us someplace unfamiliar where nonetheless we feel, for the moment, that we belong.
Above all else, duende is a feeling of involvement, being caught up in a reality created by sensation. It evades theories and analysis. It is, without explanation, and when you feel it, you know its truth. If you don’t, you don’t.
Duende embodies the the difference between emotion and algorithmic analysis of expression. In duende, we are pulled into a moment of artistic passion. All art theory is forgotten in darkness and fire, and we’re lost. A computer could scan the performance with every digital sensor that has ever been invented but still fail to detect what’s really going on.
