Diamanda Galas

Hailed as one of the most exceptional singers of our time, Diamanda Galas 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.

In the past decade, Galas has toured worldwide, presenting the work of living and dead poets who were imprisoned, exiled, or assassinated from/by their own countries, who were in fear for their lives for real or perceived political/moral dissidence: Siamanto, Ce?sar Vallejo, Ali Ahmad, Said Esber, Konstantin Kavafis, Yiannis Ritsos, Miguel Huezo Mixco, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Paul Celan, and many others.

In addition to lending her music to the films of directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone, Wes Craven, Clive Barker, Derek Jarman, Hideo Nakata, Mercedes Moncada, James Wan, Zoe Mavroudi, and others, in 2011 Gala?s collaborated with filmmaker Davide Pepe to create the experimental sound and film work, Schrei 27. The film, an unrelenting portrait of a body suffering torture in a medical facility, continues to be presented in museums, festivals and cinemas worldwide.

Since 2012, Gala?s has been composing a concert-length theatrical work for voice, electronics and piano, based on the poetry of Georg Heym. The first movement (Das Fieberspital, based on the Heym poem of the same name) premiered in 2014 as a work-in-progress at the Dark Mofo festival in Tasmania. The entire work, which includes treatments of Heym's Die Daemonen der Stadt and Das Blinde, Gottfried Benn's Mann und Frau gehn durch die Krebsbaracke, and poetry by Gala?s, is currently being developed in residence at the Grotowski Institute in Poland. It will receive its world premie?re in June 2016 during the "European City of Culture 2016" in Wroclaw.

Other current and recent work includes collaborations with the Norwegian Radio Orchestra (KORK) on treatments of poems by Paul Celan, Cesare Pavese and Georg Heym (arranged for voice, piano, electronics, and orchestra), and Espergesia, a composition for accapella voice in small sanctuaries, based on the poem by Cesar Vallejo (first performed as a work-in-progress in 2013 at the Emmanuel Vigeland Mausoleum in Oslo).

Gala?s is also completing a series new recordings as well as remastered and remixed versions of earlier works to be released in the upcoming year.

"Gala?s 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)

Visit www.diamandagalas.com and www.diamandagalas.com.mx (Diamanda's Spanish language website), for essays, exclusive digital music downloads, and original artworks.

Diamanda Galas also played at...

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