12 - Oliver Mayer - Surfing Through and Wrestling With Duende's Poetic Athleticism, Alchemy and Vulnerability

Happy spring, almost summer, Duende Duders! Hope you’ve been feeling the recharging and renewing energies that this rebirthing season brings! You know what recharged and renewed my creativity and soul vibrance lately? Discussing duende with my guest for this latest episode, the OG Duende Discusser - playwright, poet, librettist and professor Oliver Mayer! Oliver is a master word conjurer/architect of the gutsy and lyrical, a passionately rigorous explorer of life’s vibrancy and pain, and the reason this podcast exists in the first place! I was his playwriting student at USC almost seventeen years ago - omg! 😭 - and he introduced the concept of Lorca’s duende to my class during an exercise on unearthing taboos. In our conversation, we get into how I responded to this visceral prompt, and the massive impact it and he had on me as an emerging playwright. We also dig into how Oliver finds the most duende in moments “where the singer misses the high notes”, how he himself first discovered the concept of duende (I’d been wanting to know this forever!), and how his most powerful personal experience of duende was when, as a teenager, he witnessed the viscera-rattling athleticism of an opera’s Faustian final moments. Oliver and I engage in an absolute love fest for the epic art effect and burning heart of our dearest duende lover - Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, he explains how the physicality of playwriting and theatre, what he calls "a hurt business", has played a specific role in igniting duende’s more painful confrontations for his male characters, and articulates how music helps him “surf” through his duende inspirations while dreaming up a play. AND, for the first time ever, I had a previous guest submit a question for Oliver! Such a provocative query, with a super beautiful response from Oliver. It was such an honor to discuss duende with the person who first gifted it to me so long ago! I hope this very special discussion is a duende-y igniting to your creative souls, and energizes you the way it did me 🥰Check out Oliver's website here http://olivermayer.com/Read Oliver's L.A. Times article on duende here https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-aug-14-ca-duende14-story.htmlHave a great duend-ay! 🙂Follow @duendediscussions on IG for episode updates and fun, interactive duende discussing!