Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the 2005 What Comes After: Cities, Art and Recovery International Summit

present

Diamanda Galás: Defixiones, Orders from the Dead

A New York Premiere

A haunting work of mourning and catharsis,
 excavating the memory of the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek genocides

September 8 & 10, 2005

@ Michael Schimmel Center For the Arts, Pace University NYC

"No other presence in new music is so dramatic, so frightening, so controversial as Diamanda Galás. Her voice is the most phenomenal in new music."—American Music in the Twentieth Century

Vocalist, pianist, composer, performance artist and diva sine qua non Diamanda Galás makes a special two-night appearance in New York with the East Coast premiere of her latest and most ambitious work to date—Defixiones, Orders from the Dead.  Presented by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council as part of its 2005 What Comes After: Cities, Art and Recovery International Summit, this sacred operatic mass is a sweeping work of historical memory that excavates the so-called “minor holocaust” of Asia Minor—namely the Armenian, Assyrian, Anatolian and Pontic Greek genocides that occurred between 1914 and 1923—long buried and denied by the Turkish government to this day. Five years in the making, Defixiones was released on a double CD by MUTE Records (2004, North America), and has already been performed to sold out houses and critical acclaim at London’s Royal Festival Hall, Sidney Opera House, Athens National Opera, Moscow’s Gogol Theater, and Mexico City’s Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana (during the Day of the Dead), among others. John Payne of the Los Angeles Weekly writes about Defixiones: “To have any performer deal articulately with topical monstrosities is rare: to have such a badass musician saying it is a gift from God.  We know Galás reigns as the queen of extended vocal technique… She has also become one of the greatest, most original piano players on Earth...”

Diamanda Galás’s Defixiones, Orders from the Dead premieres in New York City September 8 and 10, at 8pm.  The performances will take place at Pace University’s Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts (3 Spruce St., across from City Hall).  Tickets can be purchased after July 15, 2005 at www.ticketcentral.com or by telephone at 212-279-4200 (between 12 -8 pm., 7 days a week). $15-35.

A 75-minute, highly theatrical spectacle scored for voice, piano and tape, Defixiones draws its name from the small lead charms engraved with curses and placed by relatives on graves throughout the Eastern Mediterranean to discourage desecration. Concerned with the poet/author living in exile—away from their homeland or within it—the work speaks for individuals who were treated and lived as outlaws.  Mostly composed by Galás herself, who drew from a wide range of sources, Defixiones is rooted in the rich musical worlds of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. It includes texts by Armenian poet/soldier Siamanto, Syrian/Lebanese poet Adonis, Assyrian poet-martyr Dr. Freidoun Bet-Oraham, the Anatolian Greek Amanedhes—and most recently, compositions based on the texts of Yiorgos Seferis, Yannis Ritsos, Nikos Kazantzakis, Jose-Maria Cuellar, and on the Turkish poem, Hatred, published by Hurriyet, on the eve of the 1974 invasion of Cyprus.          

Armed with a 3 1/2 octave range, a virtuosic piano technique, eight languages, and methodically researched and dissected material, Galás has created a work as immediate and prescient as her landmark Plague Mass that confronted the AIDS epidemic in a way no one else dared.  With Defixiones, the performance artist directly engages her heritage, drawing from the disaster that informed her childhood and was passed down like a bloody relic from her grandfather to her father to her. “You don’t hear these stories for 20 years and then forget about them,” says Galás. Taking the role of the Eumenides, the mythological creatures charged with administrating justice, Galás seeks to pursue the criminals with the memory of their crimes, and lends her piercingly beautiful voice to the nameless victims of this ethnic cleansing, creating a shattering work of mourning and catharsis.

“In an era of increasing Imperial dominance—its every move informed by the ancient hatreds of cultural and religious fundamentalisms—Defixiones could not be more timely.  Or timeless.  It is at once an interrogation and an edict.  It furthers Galás’ reputation as the most gifted, vital, and visionary musician of our time.  Singer and pianist, poet and composer, emissary and philosopher, Diamanda reminds us the voice is an instrument that needs to be more than just something finely honed and rigorously developed; it is the blade that cuts us all to the heart.”—Approaching Necropolis, Richard Morrison (2003).

Biography:

Raised in San Diego, California, Galás was born to Greek Orthodox parents, who always encouraged her gift for piano. She studied a wide range of musical forms, as well as visual-art performance, before moving to Europe.  There she made her performance debut at the Festival d'Avignon in France in 1979, performing the lead in the opera, "Un Jour Comme un Autre," by composer Vinko Globokar, based upon the Amnesty International documentation of the arrest and torture of a Turkish woman for alleged treason. Galás released her first recorded work in 1982, and her numerous musical and theatrical works have since included the pivotal Plague Mass (1990), the haunting mass for People with AIDS, Vena Cava (1992), the solo voice and electronic work concerning AIDS dementia and clinical depression, Schrei 27 (1996), which deals with torture in isolation, the concerts/recordings of Malediction and Prayer (1998), Judgment Day, Concert for the Damned, The Masque of the Red Death (1984 - 1988), and most recently, La Serpenta Canta (2004), a greatest-hits collection from Hank Williams to Ornette Coleman, and Defixiones, Will and Testament (2004). Diamanda Gálas’s music can also be heard in two new movies—in the Japanese director Hideo Nakata’s Ring Two, released in March 2005, and in the Spanish/Nicaraguan filmmaker Mercedes Moncada Rodriguez’s El Immortal (The Immortal), produced in Mexico, Nicaragua, Spain, and New York and at the Sundance Institute. Galás is currently working on the composition and commissioning of the opera, Nekropolis, and she has just appeared at the prestigious Milanesiana 2005 (Italy), where she performed Songs of Exile with poet Adonis."

What Comes After: Cities, Art and Recovery convenes internationally renowned artists, architects and writers, and leading cultural and community leaders from several regions of the world that have experienced and been transformed by catastrophic violence.  This is a major opportunity for international conversation and cooperation —an opportunity to learn how others have recovered from tragedy and how arts and culture help rebuild cities.  What Comes After: Cities, Art and Recovery is generously supported by Altria Group, Inc, Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art and the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) is the leading voice for arts and culture in downtown New York City, producing cultural events and promoting the arts through grants, services, advocacy, and cultural development programs.

For more information on Diamanda Gálas, visit: http://www.diamandagalas.com

For more information on the Cities, Art and Recovery Summit, visit: http://www.lmcc.net/recovery 

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Tour information can be found here.
The Defixiones micro-site is here.