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Posted by Walter Holinoty
on 10/20/2009, 12:44 am
76.226.127.122
Hi Jeff,
I found your latest interview with Sutton to be very perceptive with regard to you analyzing her art as being something beyond technique. I kept your thought in mind for a few days before remembering "Duende": the elusive Spanish term coined ages ago for rare performers like Sutton.
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...'"
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