Blood Wedding

Lost in Translation
By Clifton Lemon (Apr 05, 2007)

* The Ashby Stage
1901 Ashby Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94703 Map
510.841.6500

Federico García Lorca was by all accounts a complex, gifted, but deeply troubled character. Like Rimbaud and other hardcore romantics, his flamboyant and brief life (he was executed by Nationalist Fascist troops at the age of 38) still allowed him plenty of time to churn out enough poetry and plays to earn a spot in the pantheon of Western Art. He was also an accomplished pianist, painter, and composer. "Blood Wedding" is the first of his best-known plays in his “rural trilogy”; the others are "Yerma" and "La casa de Bernarda Alba", and is a vehicle for his “Theory of Duende” -- that “great art depends upon a vivid awareness of death, connection with a nation's soil, and an acknowledgment of the limitations of reason,” (or something like that).

Duende as an existential conceit is inextricably Spanish. One feels it, but stumbles trying to define it, although Lorca seems to have expended some effort in doing so. I know the term from my guitar teacher and mentor Guy Horn, who spent a good part of his life in Spain, playing and listening to music. For me, true flamenco is saturated in duende -- maybe that’s all you need to say about it by way of definition. In the program notes for the Shotgun Players production of "Blood Wedding", Turkish-born director Evren Odcikin writes that the play cannot be performed without duende, and that “one cannot achieve duende without flamenco.” Fair enough.

(leer +) [vía sfstation]

tags: flamenco, baile, cante, flamenca, Lorca, Bodas de Sangre