The day approaches when we whizz off to Spain.
First a nice weekend with friends and wifey and then they leave me to get on with it.
Me, alone … in search of “la duende” 

La duende, as I’ve mentioned earlier in a blog post, is the spirit, the heart and soul of flamenco.
It is only truly said to exist when the artist has an honest and heartfelt response to the performance. Almost an out of body experience when you connect with the primal soul.
Of course I have no great hopes of discovering it just like that but I hope the search will be enjoyable and perhaps productive photographically.
So, off to Seville in flamenco heartlands. They have the Bienal de Flamenco in the town at the moment so there should be no shortage of flamenco artists.
My Spanish is dismal though.
No, really bad.
I’m just hoping that a fairy godmother will wave a wand over me in Seville and transform all that vocabulary, verbs and splinters of grammar that I’ve been learning  into some intelligible mumble.
Last night I went to La Peña Flamenca de Londres in London’s Pimlico.They put on some sort of show once a month and I have visited twice so far, to meet the people and attempt to understand the art and culture of this most famous Spanish art.

Everyone knows something about flamenco dancing but almost all of us are wrong in our preconceptions.

The more I learn, the more I realise how complicated this is.
So far my research seems to indicate that flamenco is not about the fancy guitar strumming, nor the black eyed beauties twirling their frilly skirts and stamping.
It’s the song.
The “cante jondo”, the passionate song of flamenco. The stories of love and death.
The dancers and guitarists are there to support and underline this song.
I think !
My problem, photographically, is to shoot pictures that show the passion of the words and music.
It is a problem.
I can’t capture the words nor the music in pictures – so I have to rely upon seeing the feeling being shown by the artists.
So far the most visually passionate part of the performance has been with the dancers and to a lesser extent the singers, so it is this I have been photographing most.
I’m learning all the time and I will get there but at the moment I am not convinced by my results.
I have time though and it will get better.