The Age (Melbourne)
The following was
borrowed from
http://www.theage.com.au
THEATRE NOTES
Melbourne
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
SONGS OF EXILE: HAMMER HALL
BY ALISON CROGGON
There's no question that Diamanda Galas is demanding. She demands your
attention from the moment she walks onto the stage and paces, without
pause or preamble, towards the piano. She demands that you listen and
that you think. Most of all, she demands that you feel.
But the feeling she
summons is no gentle waft on the airs of sentiment. For Galas, feeling
is passion: the passion of unconsoled grief and longing; the passion for
a precise and ethical beauty in the face of unhealable divisions which
scar human existence.
And she earns the
attention she asks for. The aggression with which Galas performs
contains the arrogance of a vast generosity. Galas will give us her all:
and she expects no less from her audience. For those who expect or
desire a lower-octane experience of art, something like what Barry
Humphries calls a "nice night's entertainment, " this demands more than
confronting. It is felt as an assault, and expresses itself in tedium.
But for those prepared to take up her gift, the experience is
exhilarating.
Galas' voice, which can
range from a deep growl to pure, enchanting melody to unrestrained
ululation in the space of a few seconds, is extraordinary. She uses it
to its fullest extent, ripping up the octaves like a wild animal. And
there is something absolutely predatory in this performance. How
Galas crouches over the piano like a panther, the flexing sinews visible
in her bare shoulders as she attacks the keyboard, her mouth almost
swallowing the microphone. At one point she even slams the piano
with her hands.
SONGS OF EXILE is a
concert performance of an eclectic mixture of songs, from Johnny Cash's
25 MINUTES TO GO to music, and in her settings she displays an intuitive
understanding of the carnal nature of poetry, how poems foreground the
material nature of language. The poems remain in their original
language, as the poets wrote them (if not as they heard them). There is
nothing cerebral in these musical settings, even if they show a great
deal of intelligence--in how, for example, Galas echoes the indigenous
folk rhythms Vallejo exploits in his poetry in the fracturing melodies
of her accompaniment. She reminds us, magnificently, that poetry is
crucially an oral art.
In her book EROS THE
BITTERSWEET, the poet Anne Carson says that the acquiring of written
language is inevitably a process of alienation. "A written text," she
writes, "separates words from one another, separates words from their
environment, separates words from reader (or writer) and separates the
reader (or writer) from the environment....As separable, controllable
units of meaning...written words project their user into isolation."
Poetry is an art form that
seeks to unite the irreparably divided, to bring language back into
direct relationship with experience, to overcome, impossibly, this
primal isolation: Galas' performance takes this one step further,
vocalizing words back into raw physical reality But of course this sense
of regained unity cannot erase its original fracture and remain true to
itself: hence the refusal;. everywhere in this performance, of ease. The
truth can only ever be an exposure of woundedness.
A real highlight for me
was her performance of Paul Celan's poem TODESFUGE ("Death Fugue"),
about the Nazi death camps in which his parents perished:
Black milk of daybreak we
drink it at sundown we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at
night we drink it and drink it....
Galas' interpretation is
nightmarish, a black parody of the mechanised rhythms of Nazi marches,
or a broken and murderous nursery rhyme. Like the poem itself, the music
shirts in an instant from one register to another, finishing on
the lament: "Your golden hair Margarete/Your ashen hair Shulamith."
She sings several gospel
and blues songs: what is amazing about these versions is how, despite
her radical treatment, she plugs right into the anguished truth of the
music As the title of the concert suggests, the theme of the evening is
exile: exile from a homeland, exile from whatever one loves, exile from
oneself The divisions that mark existence are opened rawly, without
apology and without consolation. Galas' piercingly gorgeous voice is the
finely tuned instrument of lamentation and of pain.
The miraculous effect is
joy: a reconnection with the vital currents of living. The twin of the
god Thanatos, who haunts this performance, is of course Eros: Galas'
aggression is a pure expression of desire. I know that I went to bed
late that night: Galas' wild voice still echoed through my being,
forbidding the anaesthetization of sleep.