How the Spanish Flamenco Concept of ‘Duende’ Taught Me How to Feel

I mean REALLY feel

Very little has moved me more deeply in my life than the first time I experienced flamenco in Andalucia, the heel of southern Spain.

And it was a complete surprise.

The bar was nearly empty back then in early 2015. There was a small stage with two singers/dancers and a guitarist, all in double denim and coats, sheltering against the January cold. Not a flamenco dress in sight.

As they began to sing and dance I felt… something. Something weird and almost painful. Just because a singer was rhythmically clapping whilst pounding the hollow stage with his feet, I found I couldn’t breathe.

I thought it was just me. I’d just flown from the UK to Spain for some respite after a tough year. I guessed I was just a bit tired.

Until I realised half the bar was also in tears, including my usually very composed husband.

When the dancer took to the stage and pierced me with a look of despair I started crying so hard I had to leave the bar to compose myself.

It turns out, I’d just experienced duende — a heightened state of emotion that is famous in Flamenco circles but a concept hardly known outside southern Spain.

Experiencing duende changed me. It changed the way I process my emotions. It reminded me that life is about feeling, not just being.

If you’re amenable to finding it (because duende is everywhere) you can experience it too. But don’t say I didn’t warn you what it does to you.

Duende will break you

Duende is one of those foreign phrases with no direct translation. The best I’ve found is this:

Duende means something like “spirit”, and it refers to the moment of ecstasy that may be triggered during a powerful performance of flamenco. If the conditions are right, the elements of guitar, voice and dance fuse with the spectators’ rhythmic clapping and shouting to create an energy that intoxicates the senses.

This sounds pretty emotive for sure, but it’s nothing compared to reality.

In reality, it feels like being emotionally broken open by experiencing something incredibly powerful happening in front of you. You may think you’ve got your emotions well under control but duende doesn’t care. It will open you up and make you bawl in the street.

It sounds over the top. And for the longest time, I thought maybe it was just me, a sensitive soul who has trouble regulating her emotions. That was until last year when I took some friends to that very same Flamenco bar.

I was lucky enough to live next door to it for a month. My husband and I spent so much time there, you’d find our bar bill under the moniker Amigos Ingleses.

When our friends came to stay, we knew we had to take them. They’re a quiet, reserved couple and I was curious to how they’d react to flamenco.

I watched them in the bar, keen to see any hints of duende but I didn’t see a whole lot. A shame, I thought, but sometimes it doesn’t happen.

We moved our evening on to a local bar where I noticed my friends become much chattier. They told me things they’ve never told me before — and I’ve known them for 20 years.

I didn’t think too much of it until a month later when they told me that they most definitely did experience duende, and it changed everything.

It pulled out emotions they had been bottling up for decades. It nearly split them up as a couple. For the next year, they had to learn how to rebuild their lives with the newfound feelings that duende had exposed (a year later they told me it was all for the better).

Because duende is that powerful.

I know it because I’ve felt it too. Duende did to me what it did to my friends. It broke me and opened me up and reminded me that you are allowed to feel your feelings.

Once I had a hit, I wanted more. I wanted to weave the feelings duende had opened up inside me into my daily life. I wanted to feel as alive as I did that first (and second, third, fourth, and so on) visit to that tiny flamenco bar.

So that’s exactly what I did.

Duende will change you

Those of you who have read my work for a while will know I’ve dedicated over a decade of my life to wine.

I did this not because I’m a closet alcoholic or like getting drunk. I did this because wine makes me feel all the feels.

It’s about the culture and history surrounding winemaking. It’s about meeting the winemakers and feeling their passion for what they do.

Everything wine has to give can be found in a glass of something extraordinary. Wine has, on more than one occasion, brought me to tears because of what it represents. Humanity. Friendship. Family.

Life.

After that first encounter with duende, I realised my intense connection to wine exists because I’m chasing the feeling duende pulled out of me. Wine laser-focuses my life and makes me go all in — heart, soul, and all — to something messy and imperfect and wonderful and weird and life-affirming.

When you identify what makes you feel like this, you can shut out all the noise and distractions — hollow things in life that compete for your attention but leave you feeling discontented and lifeless.

Instead, you can focus on what life really, truly means to you, of what makes you tick and gives your life meaning.

Duende may be primarily associated with flamenco and southern European gypsies, but in reality, it’s an emotional state of mind everyone can harness. You just have to find something out there that makes you feel so hard, you open up in a way you never thought possible.

I’ll give you a hint. You won’t find it on Instagram.

Duende is the antithesis of fast culture

Here’s the thing about duende — modern life isn’t all that amenable to it.

The world as it stands now is intent on dulling our edges for clicks, likes, and image crafting.

A filtered Instagram photo. An over-the-top, staged display of emotion on reality TV. Someone filming a powerful performance — flamenco or otherwise — which distracts them and everyone around them.

Not only that but we’re told to keep our emotions quiet for fear of rocking the societal boat.

I’ve been told boys won’t like me if I’m too emotional. I’ve been told I’ll never get anywhere in my career if I show my true self. I’ve been told that crying fixes nothing.

None of this will ever incite duende in you.

But I’d bet a lot of money you’ve been told similar. After all, people spend thousands of dollars in therapy to bring up emotions we’re taught to dampen down at all costs. Me included.

Whilst I’m not suggesting duende is a replacement for therapy, it could help break your emotional barrier. Which is important, because what is life without feeling the good and the bad?

Duende can be found in many places, not only in flamenco. You can find it in music, literature, film, art, anything that makes you feel, anything that opens you up, that pulls you in.

A few years ago I read a book by Matt Goulding — an Anthony Bourdain compatriot— called Grape Olive Pig. This is a book about deep travels into Spain’s food culture.

About three pages in, I realised this dude’s writing had serious duende. He draws you fully and wholeheartedly into the world of Spain through heartbreaking prose. Prose that you never want to stop reading. Prose that pricks the corners of your eyes.

Music is another big one. Singer Nick Cave once addressed an audience about writing love songs and the role duende can have in creating truly soulful music:

Bob Dylan has always had it. Leonard Cohen deals specifically in it. It pursues Van Morrison like a black dog and though he tries to, he cannot escape it. Tom Waits and Neil Young can summon it. It haunts Polly Harvey. … Tindersticks desperately want it, but all in all it would appear that duende is too fragile to survive the brutality of technology and the ever increasing acceleration of the music industry.

The brutality of technology? I couldn’t have said it better myself, Nick.

To feel duende — to seek it and harness its power — you have to step out of the virtual world and into the real one. It’s probably going to hurt — just ask my friends. And it may break you down.

But I promise it’s worth it. Because what comes after — a feeling of being alive — is addictive. And may change your life like it changed mine.

And those friends.

Whilst I’ve always been emotional, I’ve not always known how to properly deal with those emotions. I worry too much about what other people think of me so I’ll dampen down a lot of what I think and feel to fit in.

Duende has helped me to change all that.

It reminds me that we need to feel life as well as live the mechanics of it. That we have to embrace the best and the worst of life.

That you have to feel truly alive.

Nowadays, I seek it out. In books and music, even in Medium articles.

But nothing quite does it like that tiny bar in Southern Spain.

This is exactly why I’m writing this from that very same apartment I rented last year. Once I finish writing this, I’m ducking into that flamenco bar where I’m called Amiga Inglesa for a sherry or two. To see that dancer I now know as Carmen and the singer I now know as David.

To — I hope — feel duende.

To feel alive again.

I’ve just launched a new remote wine consulting service called SommAnywhere. Tell me what you like to drink and where you live, I’ll send you a list of the best places local-to-you and online stores, and what you should buy from each of them. Book the service here