Black Sounds

A dance and music performance based on motifs by Federico Garcia Lorca's lecture Play and Theory of the Duende

Première 29. september 2020, Divaška jama
Running time 40 minutes. No intermission. 

Concept, choreography Ana Pandur
Concept co-author, music and lyrics Damir Avdić
Performers Ana Pandur, Damir Avdić
Concept collaborator Sebastijan Horvat
Light designer Mitja Novak
Sound designer Daniel Bauman
Video Tomaž Pavković
Photographers Drago Videmšek, Darja Štravs Tisu 

Play and Theory of the Duende, a lecture by the great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, is considered one of the fundamental works for understanding the flamenco. Since 2020, it has been available in the Slovenian translation by Andreja Udovč, with Ana Pandur’s foreword. It provides a starting point for thinking about the importance and power of creation, and at the same time, opens the questions about the ideological abuse of art’s transformative power. With Black Sounds, we venture into the research of the fields of freedom, revolt against the existing convention, the crossroads of the personal and the real in the act of creation and their implication within the societal. Specifically, Lorca’s text provides substance for the central theme of the production in its paradoxical relationship to the subverted meaning the text has endured throughout the 20th century, with its emphasis on repeating history. Expressing the freedom that transcends genre, searching for meaning and beauty within the given circumstances – or despite them – is the key. Black Sounds continues and deepens the thought of Ana Pandur’s Firebird, which thematises the eternal return of the same and the longing for the freedom that comes with flying. In the title of his lecture, Lorca starts with play, which (as any other system) has the possibility of mistake or lapse, a momentary delay that opens new horizons and carries transformative potential, opens a field of new freedom and leads towards new play. At the same time, this lapse can bring about ideological subversion that can turn the play into a tool and subject of manipulation. In search of the intersection between the two worlds, where the nearness of the end-death is always anticipated, be it for the production, ideological or political reason, the production opens a new reconsideration about the meaning of ideological abuse of creative thought.