THE GUARDIAN Saturday December 11 1999
GOTHIC MEMORIAL
Diamanda Galas
Barbican,London
**** 4 star rating
On paper, Diamanda Galas's latest performance, brought to the UK as
part of the Barbican's Only Connect series, is a simple one woman
show. But in the flesh, the violent versatility of Galas's voice
brings a terrifyingly vivid kaleidoscope of peoples, languages and
horrors to her 90-minute set.Part theatre, part cabaret, and part
supernatural songcycle, Galas's DEFIXIONES, WILL AND TESTAMENT
incorporates wild arrangements of Ornette Colemman and John Lee Hooker
alongside settings of poems by Henri Michaux, the Armenian poet
Siamanto, and texts by Galas herself.
Galas's inspiration for the evening comes from a relatively unknown
chapter of East European history: the Turkish attempts in 1915 and
1922 to remove the Greek and Armenian populations living on Turkish
soil.
Appropriately for a work dedicated to the" forgotten and erased"
victims of this violence, Galas begins in a spirit of savage lament,
with a searingly intense solo number. Although not directly a folk
melody, the essence of this music lies in Armenian culture. Imbued
with a hyper-intense operatic vibrato, Galas's voice seems to come
directly from the grieving of an entire nation.
As the set develops, Galas creates alarming juxtapositions. In one
number, she starts with a piano accompaniment of almost Mozartean
urbanity. But her voice intones a Cesar Vallejo poem with grating
desperation. Avant-garde explosions start to puncture the piano part
before the texture errupts into a torrent of words and music pitted
against one another.
Galas can do things with her voice that virtually no one else can.
She is able to create a lucid terror from screams and screeches, as in
her setting of Michaux's Poetry for Power. But Galas's real gift is
her ability to sustain a dramatic progression throughout the whole
set. Tellingly, the later numbers used contemporary styles and forms,
in contrast with the ritualistic austerity of the opening.
It is impossible not to be shaken by the gothic seriousness of
Galas's vocal and her theatrical presence. This ferocious performance
is a forceful and timely reminder of the blood-stained past that
forged the superficial contentment of our present.
Tom Service
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