Workshop: UNLEASHING THE DUENDE

A talk and embodied workshop with Alfredo Minetti & Fernanda Ghi
Wednesday 9/23/26 from 7-9 pm in La Sala Ballroom W20-202, 84 Massachusetts Ave.

What is duende? Poet Federico García Lorca described it as a raw, embodied creative force that overtakes a performer — not skill, not style, but an expressive drive that arrives only through vulnerability and risk. This 2-hour event explores that question first through ideas, then through the body.

Cultural anthropologist and pianist Alfredo Minetti opens with a short talk on why genuine artistic risk has become so rare in performance today. Drawing on Lorca, Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, and Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, he traces how consumer culture and entertainment saturation have pushed the performing arts toward spectacle and surface polish, sidelining the vulnerability that makes performance feel alive. Using classical concert music as a case study — including pianist Glenn Gould's defiant breaks from convention — Minetti makes the case for reclaiming performance as something lived and risked, not simply produced and consumed.

Minetti and choreographer Fernanda Ghi then engage in a conversation on these ideas, bringing together their perspectives as musician and dancer before moving into direct physical experience.

Ghi leads participants into that embodied exploration: Is duende an energy? An emotion? A force that wakes the most authentic, creative self? Through guided breathing, free movement, and improvisation — both solo and with a partner — participants will explore what happens when the body moves beyond learned technique and habit. The practice invites letting go, releasing control, quieting the analytical mind, and simply being present — creating the conditions for duende to emerge.

This is not a class in choreography or performance technique. It's an embodied investigation into creativity, presence, and authentic expression — for anyone curious as to why a performance can feel hollow even when flawlessly executed, and what it takes to bring the danger and depth back. No dance or musical experience required.

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