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defixiones reviews |
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(Spanish to English translation by Gilbert Roman) Once in a lifetime recital in the cloister dedicated to the tenth Muse. Diamanda Galas brothered her music with the beings of great spirit. Revisited Paul Celan, Henri Michaux, Cesar Vallejo and Gerard de Nerval among others. Wager for the dispossessed, the rebels and the heroes of resistance, device of the singer. Pablo Espinosa. A recital by the fallen. Like an echo at the spontaneous ritual that occurs when whales sing during the height of the night in the ocean, a lady of almost transparent skin dressed in black clothes joined at their waist intonates a profound sung music. The potency of her vocal chords - almost four octaves, from the chillingly acute to the terrifyingly acute- is superior to any operatic work and to the soaring displays of any known singer. Supernatural, it could be said. The aesthetic effects are evident in her hearings: deconstructed, moved, purifies, revolted, revived. Exhausts like after a ceremony of initiation or an exorcism. Because a recital by Diamanda Galas is a situation taken to the limit. Seated in front of a Petrof piano, elevates plights, modulates laments, evaporates a ritual that marries Eros and Tanatos in an artistic procedure similar to alchemy: once condensed the substance of the offering, what's left is a testimony. Protest against the impugn homicide Diamanda Galas offered an intense recital, on solo piano the night of November the 1st in Sor Juana's Cloister. The setting is ideal: a nocturnal patio converted into a uterus. The public swimming in - amniotic liquid, in a stance of trance- is submerged in fogginess, as well as the piano, and the blunt and hard body of Diamanda and barely minimalist lights, diamond like reflections and wax emerge to the surface. Defixiones, Will and Testament, is the title of the recital of this new visit from Diamanda Galas. The Defixiones are signs on the crypts that indicate that that tomb bears a spirit which has been negated rest because it died in a violent manner. A soul exiled from its death. The genesis of this recital exists in the tombs of the Armenians and Greeks massacred at the hands of Turks in 1915 and 1922, which explained Diamanda in an interview (La Jornada, 19/10/00) and from there the scream of protest elevates itself against every impugn genocide, every abuse of power, every unjustified wrongfulness, and every humiliation without a known predator. The music of Diamanda Galas sisters itself in this recital with the poetry of cursed authors, banished, exiled, that have left testimony of their greatness of spirit: Paul Celan, Henri Michaux, Cesar Vallejo, Gerard de Nerval, Atom Yarjanian, and the animus and artistic feel refreshes itself in the coherency of artistic, aesthetic, moral, social, and human principles that harbors Diamanda Galas and whose primary material of her art, located at the side of the dispossessed, the rebels, the heroes of the resistance. A response for the souls without rest. A series of prelude-chants to that unknown chant inside which death intonates the first solemn note, like Alphonse Marie de Lamartie used to meditate poetically. A recital sung in ten idioms. A season in hell with the vowels on fire by Rimbaud and put to music by the throat of the lady Galas in a prodigious of chant that elevates the scream, the murmur, the song of angels to the category of the fine arts. To scream, to murmur the same way a lullaby is intonated. Among the thirteen pieces that the author interpreted of "A plague mass", the eighth titled "Epistle of the transients" is armed with the verses of Cesar Vallejo, sung in a delirium of grunts, bleats, screams, and musical caresses. "But when I die/ from life and not time/ when they arrive to my two luggage bags/ this has to be my stomach in which fitted my lam to pieces/ there is that head that spied the torments of the circle in my steps/ this has to be my strong body/ for the one who watches the individual soul/ this has to be my belly button in which I killed my own lice/ this my thing thing, my thing terrified." The public hears and wrinkles itself dominated by the artistic prodigy that is occurring in plain cloister. Amongst the darkness - dense darkness whose terseness can be touched with finger points - its perceived, the stream of continuous air that bears the open and mute mouths when they hear so many audible marvels from the piano, from the breathing diaphragm of Diamanda. Every time that a piece reaches the end, begins a breathing of weak batteries: an unequivocal atmosphere, the public full of ecstasy and exhausted from so much spilled adrenaline. Undulating adrenaline can be smelled amongst the rabid demonstration by the public submerged in humid fogginess. Give lengths to death Diamanda Galas sings: if I die in the navigation, say that I was beautiful and that I enjoyed life. whoever protagonizes that poem is an ancient greek lady. "What a pain - said to us Diamanda in an interview - is a girl that left this song for her girlfriend and wants to be remembered like a beautiful man, for her, because she wants to be eternally her, a greek woman." And Diamanda does it with pieces of "rembetika" music that is a mix of melodies from the Middle East that used to unify Armenians, Turks, and Greeks to sing and smoke pot, and she does it with the "amanes" technique, that is a form of improvised chant that used to be entonated in the desert accompanied by "bouzoukies and ouds", and ancient instruments, but Diamanda does it all with voice and piano: if death arrives and asks for me - sings Diamanda - tell her to return some other day because I still haven't finish a poem, I still haven't given a kiss farewell to my girlfriend, I haven't settled my debts nor have I reconciled with my enemies. It's not due to fear, tell her to come back later because I still haven't known a son. Diamanda is alone on stage, amongst darkness, and poor and dying lights that at the same time are reborn on the floor. She is alone between the microphone and a piano. Alone between her art that is magnificent and the public that is exhausted. Alone between the contentious effect of her chant and the public, that is also alone and is going to die entirely, like her, and that will emerge purified, like her, and her voice will remain in the craniums, and the souls resonating and re-blowing like echoes during the entire night like a chant of whales at the heights, and when this recital ends that is unique and irrepeatable like is everything that joins what is scary with what is beautiful, in other words, death with life, Eros and Tanatos condensed in a mold that carries the sign of Sublime, slow inscription at the height where often goes the head of the dead when they expire to rest from within their crypts, looking at the sky with the eyes devoid of body, their spirits rejoicing of resonating life. Everything is placed in the chant of a range of almost four octaves of Diamanda Galas, that in this manner offered a recital the night of the dead of the year 2000 in Sor Juana's cloister.
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