"I only aspire to one thing: membership to the pantheon." Known for her
haunting vocal epics, singer/composer Diamanda Galas may get her
wish.
In a Bay Area premiere, her first San Francisco performance in
10 years, Galas brings her 2004 solo show, Defixiones, Orders
from the Dead, to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theatre Oct
19 and 21.
A theatrical spectacle scored for voice, piano and tape, and
five years in the making, this haunting mass excavates the
Armenian, Assyrian, Anatolian and Pontic Greek genocides of 1914
and 1923. A descendent of the survivors, Galas considers this her
most personal work.
With a chillingly beautiful three-and-a-half octave voice and
virtuosic piano technique, Galas sings various texts in eight
languages. With methodically researched material and a passion for
exposing forgotten events, Galas reaches shamanically into the
depths of history to resurrect the dead.
In conversation, Galas is serious when discussing her subject
matter, but jovial and raucous as she dismisses critics, like one
Melbourne, Australia reviewer who panned her show without having
seen it.
Those who misunderstand her work have typified it as having
Satanic elements. One album, The Litanies of Satan (1989),
led to such early categorization. Masque of the Red Death
includes the expansive "You Must Be Certain of the Devil."
According to B.A.R . writer Michael Flanagan, who assisted
her research for Plague Mass, after a 1990 concert in Italy
at the Palace of the Medicis, Italian government officials called
her performance "more scandalous than Madonna" and "true
blasphemy."
"Some people want to perceive [my work] as satanic rituals,"
said Galas. "I'm not selling that." Instead, Galas uses demonic
terminology to confront the more real evils of the world:
mendacity, homophobia, and political corruption.
An avowed atheist, Galas, 51, considers her work as liturgy,
often using text from various faiths. By using iconic or ancient
text, Galas music requires some homework to truly appreciate. But
even those new to her work will find a blunt if not unnerving
relevance to modern times.
Having just returned from Paris and Ghent (Belgium), where she
performed other works, Galas will perform in Santa Cruz and Los
Angeles later this month. But the Yerba Buena shows are the only
West Coast performance of Defixiones, in which her Greek
heritage plays prominently.
Born and raised in San Diego, the daughter of an Anatolian
father and mother from Sparta, Galas studied classical piano as a
child among a musically talented Greek Orthodox family. Galas made
her performance debut in 1979 at the Festival d'Avignon in France
as the lead in Globokar's opera, Un Jour Comme Une Autre,
which deals with the death by torture of a Turkish woman. As she
charmed New York's downtown arts scene in the 1980s, Galas began
touring the world with her solo shows.
Galas' brother, Philip-Dimitri Galas, who died of AIDS in 1986,
was a handsome playwright known for his "AvantVaudeville" style
which anticipated a trend toward a new style in performance art
and theatre.
While others took to more sentimental remembrances to
commemorate the loss from AIDS, Galas used her personal grief to
create dark, chilling anthems to confront AIDS and apathy toward
it. Vena Cava is based on her brother's writings as he
suffered from AIDS-related dementia.
Mass intensity
Galas' Plague Mass is possibly most widely known among
gay fans for its bleak and frightening musical depiction of the
suffering of PWAs. Considered her breakthrough performance for
American audiences, Galas' October 1990 concert at New York City's
Cathedral of St. John the Divine stands as a peak moment for
AIDS-related art. Coated in blood and topless for a portion of the
work, Galas combined ululating shrieks, whispers and howls with an
intensity that left the audience stunned.
"I used real blood for a long time," said Galas of Plague
Mass. "The reason I stopped was quite frankly that artificial
blood looks better on stage than real blood. Real blood turns
brown."
Ten months before that pivotal show, Galas was one of 111
people arrested inside New York City's St. Patrick's Cathedral in
the largest protest organized by the AIDS Coalition To Unleash
Power (ACT UP). This was also where I got to know Galas, who said
she still retains a connection to the memory of ACT UP. "I gained
10 years of youth from being in jail with those boys," said Galas.
The St. John the Divine performance remains nearly unique for
another reason. "Ask me how many churches I get to perform in,"
said Galas. "Just one in Berlin."
Galas prefers churches not only for their thematic parallels to
her work. "It's the best acoustic space for me, for the
resonance," she said. "My work is liturgical, with strong concepts
of faith, and of those who back up their faith. You have a belief
and you back it up. What else is faith?"
Nevertheless, few churches have allowed her access to perform.
In Liepsig, where she was scheduled to perform in a church,
producers abruptly moved audiences via bus to a nearby factory,
where the show was restaged.
Sung in multiple languages, and performed in a solemn black
robe, the 90-minute Defixiones mourns those exiled or
massacred by religious and political bigotry. "I wanted to use
very specific text about the genocides and the treatment of people
who were considered to be infidels," said Galas. "It's a very
obvious nod to the way the Assyrians are being treated today in
Iraq; also about the invasion of Cyprus."
Galas sees Christian influence as covering up the roots of most
pagan-based faiths. "African Yoruba, their idea of polytheism; it
remains in the culture," she said. "It's replaced by whatever the
new gods are. There's no Greek who's not gonna tell you they're no
longer pagan."
Even without knowing these background details (text
translations are provided in the work's CD), Galas' performances
can be enjoyed for her unique singing. How does the singer
maintain her nearly four-octave vocal range?
"Try to stay away from parasites," she said. "By this, I mean
human parasites: people who want to take your soul, benefit from
it and eat it. Also, don't hang out with chain smokers in disco
bars. I keep training. I drink about nine espressos a day, so I'm
not an ideal citizen for voice training. You're supposed to drink
water, but I don't, much."
Galas said her strong vocal range helps, too, by "effectively
resting one part of the voice while using another. I use my voice
in a lot of different ways."
Despite the cultural specificity of Defixiones , the
concept of a violated grave applies, obviously, to recent and
current events. Galas performed Defixiones in 2005 at Pace
University's Schiller Auditorium (blocks from Ground Zero) as part
of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's series What Comes
After: Cities, Art, and Recovery .
"It was so hard to present in New York," she said. "No one
would produce it." Having lived in Manhattan's East Village for
nearly two decades, Galas remains strong in her opinions about the
events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the treatment of its victims'
memory.
"What makes me really sick are these people from outside New
York who think it's really hip to call these people symbols," she
said. "See somebody die burned alive, and tell me how you can make
a symbol out of them."
She calls the terrorists who crashed planes into the World
Trade Center "overeducated, middle-class men" who "prematurely
ejaculated," missing their intended targets by crashing the
buildings too early in the day. "They killed secretaries and
immigrant workers instead of the executives. They didn't even off
the people they were trying to kill."
Personal struggles play into her work as well. Galas also dealt
with a years-long bout of Hepatitis brought on by her former
IV-drug use. She cited her treatment and recovery as a strange
influence on her work.
"The drugs make it a desert; you see nothing," she said. "When
you're on Interferon, everything is gray, like being the living
dead. It was really a difficult time, mind-taxing. But I went on
tour [while taking] it. I had to pay the rent. It made my
performances wild."
Not that she hasn't heard that description before. When Galas
performed Plague Mass in 1991 at the Lycabettus Ampitheatre
on a hilltop overlooking Athens, the audience of 3,500 Greeks
"definitely got it," she said. "Some of them were crawling onto
the stage. They saw it as a work of Greek tragedy, which was
always political. The protagonist is given a choice. He knows
what's going to happen. That is essentially how he defines
himself, which choice he makes."
Galas has chosen to make difficult themes her life's work,
turning tragedy into stunning performative catharsis.
Diamanda Galas performs Defixiones: Orders
from the Dead, Thurs., Oct. 19, & Sat., Oct. 21 at 8 p.m. Yerba
Buena Center for the Arts Theatre, 700 Howard St., SF. Tickets
($21-$35, student/senior discounts): 978-ARTS.
www.ybca.org.
