San Francisco Chronicle
Oct 21 2006
REVIEW
She’s got the singing down, but audience must trust that Galas has
the right words
Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic
Saturday, October 21, 2006
For nearly three decades, the avant-garde vocalist and composer
Diamanda Galas has been a pitiless virtuoso of two emotional realms:
rage and grief. Given the state of things, she doesn’t look ready to
run out of material anytime soon.
Galas returned to the Bay Area on Thursday after a long absence with
an evening-length work that was at once new and wrenchingly familiar.
"Defixiones: Orders From the Dead," an 80-minute memorial tribute to
the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian victims of the Turkish genocide,
deploys all the darkly expressionistic musical resources in her
considerable arsenal — from operatic shrieks to guttural growls,
with stops in between for lullabies, ululations and simple (and
not-so-simple) recitation.
Appearing in the first of two shows at the Yerba Buena Center for the
Arts Theater, Galas used these techniques as she always has, to craft
a dark and theatrically potent howl of defiance and despair. Her work
is not for the faint of heart.
But it’s not necessarily for the uninitiated, either. Galas has a
tried-and-true cohort of devotees happy to applaud her every
undertaking. And "Defixiones," for all its raw urgency, has a
somewhat hermetic air of ritual that suggests she is playing
increasingly to the fan base.
Though it’s been in the works for at least seven years, the piece has
a certain odd timeliness. It comes on the heels of the politically
charged decision to award the Nobel Prize for literature to Turkish
novelist Orhan Pamuk, as well as France’s passage of a law making it
a crime to deny the Armenian genocide.
But Galas seems reluctant to open her work rhetorically to the point
where specific content could register with an audience. In
"Defixiones" (the title refers to warnings printed on gravestones
against moving the remains of the dead), there are texts in Armenian,
Greek, Assyrian and Turkish as well as English.
Listeners not conversant in those tongues can read the translations
ahead of time (once the show begins, sepulchral darkness prevails).
But in performance, it’s hard to interpret the show as anything more
concrete than an extended requiem for the unknown dead.
This issue of textual transparency has not always interfered with the
impact of Galas’ artistry. In her earlier works — particularly the
extravagantly showy pieces of the early ’80s such as "Wild Women With
Steak Knives" and the extraordinary "Panoptikon," or the AIDS "Plague
Mass" that consumed her through the rest of that decade — Galas
often mingled multilingual texts with abandon. The poetry of
Baudelaire rubbed elbows with the Bible and the blues.
But in those pieces, poetic texts were used as fodder for musical and
vocal pyrotechnics. What mattered was not the exact words, but the
electrifying, almost physically present dance of sounds that Galas
crafted out of them.
In "Defixiones," by contrast, the untranslated texts — poems, oral
testimony, news reports, Turkish propaganda — are right at the
forefront. Galas sings or declaims them with exemplary diction, as
though the audience needed to catch every word. The thought of
supertitles has never seemed so alluring.
In the absence of any concrete sense, the audience is left simply to
marvel at the unstoppable force and virtuosity of Galas’ own
exertions.
There are bursts of extended vocalism — gibbering, screeching,
caterwauling — that recall her early works. There are swooping
melismas done in pure operatic style and the raspy whisper that seems
to come from beyond the grave.
At a few junctures, Galas relocates to the grand piano to accompany
herself on bluesy numbers or let loose with a few Lisztian keyboard
runs. She recites one poem while stamping rhythmically in a sort of
flamenco of death; she ends the evening kneeling, as if in
supplication.
It’s all undeniably gripping, in a Grand Guignol sort of way. All it
needs is for Galas to deign to let the audience in.
Diamanda Galas: "Defixiones: Orders From the Dead" repeats at 8 p.m.
today at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, 700 Howard St.
Tickets: $19-$35. Call (415) 978-2787 or go to