Your Travalanche Daily Digest for October 27, 2026
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Sunday, August 01, 2010
El Duende and underlying objective
Curious, I consulted the oracle of Palo Alto, which sent me to the Wikipedia. What I found was electrifying. The whole article is worth a read, and is quite short, but here are some highlights:
The meaning of duende as in tener duende (having duende) is a rarely-explained concept in Spanish art, particularly flamenco, having to do with emotion, expression and authenticity. In fact, tener duende can be loosely translated as having soul.
El duende is the spirit of evocation. It comes from inside as a physical/emotional response to music. It is what gives you chills, makes you smile or cry as a bodily reaction to an artistic performance that is particularly expressive. Folk music in general, especially flamenco, tends to embody an authenticity that comes from a people whose culture is enriched by diaspora and hardship; vox populi, the human condition of joys and sorrows.
According to Christopher Maurer, editor of "In Search of Duende", at least four elements can be isolated in Lorca's vision of duende: irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical. The duende is a demonic earth spirit who helps the artist see the limitations of intelligence, reminding him that "ants could eat him or that a great arsenic lobster could fall suddenly on his head"; who brings the artist face-to-face with death, and who helps him create and communicate memorable, spine-chilling art. The duende is seen, in Lorca's lecture, as an alternative to style, to mere virtuosity, to God-given grace and charm (what Spaniards call "angel"), and to the classical, artistic norms dictated by the muse. Not that the artist simply surrenders to the duende; he or she has to battle it skillfully, "on the rim of the well", in "hand-to-hand combat". To a higher degree than the muse or the angel, the duende seizes not only the performer but also the audience, creating conditions where art can be understood spontaneously with little, if any, conscious effort. It is, in Lorca's words, "a sort of corkscrew that can get art into the sensibility of an audience... the very dearest thing that life can offer the intellectual." The critic Brook Zern has written, of a performance of someone with duende, "it dilates the mind's eye, so that the intensity becomes almost unendurable... There is a quality of first-timeness, of reality so heightened and exaggerated that it becomes unreal...".[1]
Lorca writes: "The duende, then, 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.' Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation.""Everything that has black sounds in it, has duende." (i.e. emotional 'blackness')
"This 'mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains' is, in sum, the spirit of the earth, the same duende that scorched the heart of Nietzsche, who searched in vain for its external forms on the Rialto Bridge and in the music of Bizet, without knowing that the duende he was pursuing had leaped straight from the Greek mysteries to the dancers of Cadiz or the beheaded, Dionysian scream of Silverio's siguiriya."
"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, and it produces an almost religious enthusiasm."
"All arts are capable of duende, but where it finds greatest range, naturally, is in music, dance, and spoken poetry, for these arts require a living body to interpret them, being forms that are born, die, and open their contours against an exact present." [1]
– García Lorca, Play and Theory of the Duende
Reading this article started to stir up my bodily humors: adrenaline, bile and testosterone in equal parts. This duende seems to be a great description of what we attempt to bring to our work in class by articulating an underlying objective for the character. There are so many great things in the piece above, but particularly appropriate to the class is the thing about duende "creating conditions where art can be understood spontaneously with little, if any, conscious effort." In the first class of the ten weeks, I always point to a passage from the first chapter of Boleslavsky's book, where Boleslavsky informs the actor that their work must be such that those watching must "know and feel immediately" that what the actor is doing is more important than whatever the spectator was preoccupied with in the moment before the actor began. It seems that for this recognition to be immediate, it must be pre-cognitive: it must speak to the intuitions and instincts of the spectator.
If duende is so elusive and norm-defying, why do we try to get at it with technique? Well, the truth is that I can make a few points about what an underlying objective is or isn't, but at a certain point, the actor has to move beyond the rules and, by fusing herself to the role, wrench the answer from deep within. She is almost required to become a poet for a moment, or at least to touch the poetic spirit the writer has imbued the work with. Yes, it's frustrating, but if it were merely a matter of a few simple rules, I guarantee the duende would never appear. Articulating an underlying objective does not guarantee the appearance of duende; indeed, it is clear that nothing ever could. But it creates a condition of receptiveness; the actor makes herself into a vessel and waits to be filled.
Not bad for a Sunday night, n'est-ce pas?
Saturday, July 31, 2010
"Christopher Nolan does not shit solid gold. Like most people, he shits shit. Inception, for example."
Some other highlights:
Just an example here, to give you an idea of how original the bones of this film are: Nolan wrote, then reviewed, considered, and retained the following line: “I just need this one last job.” You might have thought this line would be banned from heist films forever, but no.
between creating visual spectacle, teasing along the cheap emotion, and having his cast awkwardly explain what could have been confusing plot points, there’s very little time to make things cohere.
Even when his story is little more than 10th-grade psychology wrapped around 8th-grade science, Nolan treats it as if it’s Einstein giving a college lecture on Jung
My sentiments EXACTLY. Can you say SOPHOMORIC?
There was one really great actor in Inception. But who was it? Put your cards on the table in the comments, and in a few days I'll say who it was. (hint: it's not Leo: he's up to his usual tricks in this movie)
Thursday, July 29, 2010
why acting matters
I am a passionate reader of political blogs, liberal political blogs in particular (the other kind not being good for my blood pressure ;) ). Earlier this month I read a piece at Digby's Hullabaloo which has been knocking around in my brain, and I think offers some valuable insight into the precise way in which what it is that we do is such a precious asset in our world, or can be.
Digby quotes a Boston Globe article:
Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.
And of course that is only the beginning:
...it appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions. A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare — the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct — but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)
People generally don't change their minds over salient political issues through rational argumentation. And I think that's where the (really good) actor comes in.
A really good actor can arouse not only sympathy for the character's plight: he can actually arouse empathy. The people sitting there watching can experience the character as an extension of themselves. In other words, the barrier between the self of the actor and the self of the observer can be temporarily dissolved. Plato was so worried about this possibility that he proposed that the dramatic poets should be banished from his imaginary republic. The threat to people's rational capacities seemed to him to be just too great; people could entirely lose track of the distinctions between themselves and others. This possibility of forging an empathic bond between the actor and spectator is rare enough that most people haven't actually experienced it, but important enough that striving to fulfill this promise and keep this possibility alive is, to my mind, among the most legitimate and worthy of pursuits. Lucky thing, since I teach acting.
I think this possibility of empathic bonding is one of the ways in which people might be brought to revise their views of situations in the larger society. Not by being told that what they believe is wrong, but by getting that the other guy dreams, the other guy hurts. That the other guy's dreams and hurts are our own dreams and hurts, the differences are superficial. Not by being told this, but by getting it, getting it because some actor embodied that dreaming and that hurting in a compelling and undeniable way. In a way that lets you see something in the other guy's eyes that you've never been able to see before.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
what not to do at an audition
come audition for my show!
I know I have been quiet for a while, but I am back in the saddle now. I hope you didn't miss me TOO much!
Announcing (Drum Roll Please!)
Custom Made Theatre Company is holding auditions for their upcoming production of Spalding Gray: Stories Left to tell, directed by Andrew Utter. We are looking for 2 Men and 2 Women of any age and ethnicity.
Synopsis
SPALDING GRAY: Stories Left to Tell catapults the audience into the hilarious, heartbreaking, and ultimately remarkable life of one of the most irreverent and revered storytellers of our time. A five person ensemble perform the beloved classics and never-before-heard stories that embrace the wit and wisdom found in the words of Spalding Gray.
Audition Dates: 14th or 15th
Audition Times Between: 12-3p on Saturday 8/14 and 2-5p on Sunday 8/15 (5 minute slot)
Audition Location: 1620 Gough Street, San Francisco at the Next Stage
To schedule an audition go to: https://instant-scheduling.com/sch.php?kn=360707
Sides will be sent once your appointment has been confirmed.
For the audition, you should plan to do one or two contemporary monologues, 1 min each. You can either do monologues you already have, or you can choose among the sides sent when you sign up.
Rehearsals Start: Mid-November
Tech. Period: January 14-20
Previews: January 21, 22, 23
Opens: January 25 (Tues.)
Performance Schedule after Opening: Thurs. – Sat., 8:00 p.m.; Sun., 7:00 p.m.
Scheduled Close: February 19
Possible extension close: February 26
Stipend: $150-$200
For questions, Contact Daunielle Rasmussen at drasmussen@custommade.org.
Hope to see you there!
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