Cover art courtesy Diamanda Galás
Diamanda Galás is hailed as one of the most important singers of our time. Galás has earned international acclaim for her highly original and politically charged performance works. Notable among these are Plague Mass, Defixiones: Orders from the Dead, Vena Cava, Schrei X and The Refugee. Most recently, her performance work has concerned the musical setting of texts written by exiled poets and writers worldwide. She was the first recipient of the Demetrio Stratos award, Italy’s prize for musical innovation.
In 2010 Galás collaborated with filmmaker Davide Pepe to create the experimental sound and film work Schrei 27, an unrelenting portrait of a body suffering torture in isolation. In 2012 Galás began her collaborations with orchestrator Jon Ølvind Ness, resulting in a groundbreaking concert with the Norwegian Radio Orchestra at the Kanonhallen. Also in 2012 Galás presented a lecture-performance, In the Mouth of the Crocodile, at the “Weaving Politics” Symposium in Stockholm (alongside Julia Kristeva and choreographer William Forsyth), and opened Antony Hegarty’s Meltdown Festival at the Southbank Centre in London.
Galás’ work in progress Espergesia (with words by Cesar Vallejo, from The Black Heralds), was recently performed solo a capella in the Emanuel Vigeland Mausoleum in Oslo, with no electronics or amplification, within the space’s natural 25-second delay, in complete darkness. This was the first public performance of the 17-minute work, and it began what Galás hopes to be a series of performances of the work in highly reverberant sacred spaces.
Currently, in addition to continued touring, lecture-performances and experiments in visual art, Galás is completing a series of new recordings as well as remastered and remixed versions of earlier works to be released in 2016.
“Galás carries Stanislavsky’s method of emotional truth to a logical extreme neither he nor Duse nor Lee Strasberg ever dreamed of. I have rarely heard such power of expression commanded by a single performer. … Galas is an aesthetic revolutionary.”
(Mark N. Grant, August 2007, New Music Box Magazine)
