Diamanda Galás - a voice to be reckoned with

Writer Rebecca Cook spoke to Diamanda Galás about her work ahead of her visit to Melbourne.

"Maria Callas said that singing in her bathroom was one of the great joys of her life," laughs fellow diva Diamanda Galás. She can now find the humour in her recent exile from an artist-in-residency gig.

"One of the greatest horrors that happened to me recently is I was given a church to sing in but because the man (who ran the program) did not like me, he took it away from me after three days and told me I could only sing in this one place, which ended up being my restroom. Bathrooms have great acoustics and I did a tremendous amount of work there. I was quite content."

It's an hilarious image, a musical phenomena like Galás spending six weeks singing in a church toilet, but it is her determination not to be crushed that highlights the parallels between her own tremendous sense of defiance and resolve, and the subject matter in the two shows she is bringing to the Festival: Songs of Exile and Defixiones.

After speaking out against the management who ran the artist-in-residency program, Galás was asked to leave the program. She refused, but after six weeks, they found another way to get her out. In a beautiful note of symmetry, Galás had been reading a book on exiled writers at the time.

"I had been reading these wonderful letters from Seneca (the banished playwright and philosopher) to his mother because he had been exiled from Italy, then the next day I was kicked out by these security guards and they took me to another city."

Sitting alone in a tiny hotel in that other city, the book (which she gleefully declares she stole) was the cure for her blues.

"Every single one of those writers that get into trouble, they do it because they reach critical mass - you cannot tolerate it, it's not to be tolerated, you say something about it and you're out. People who don't get tossed out are the people who keep their mouths shut. Well if you're a slave, like the Stoic philosophers were slaves of the Roman Empire, then you have to keep your mouth shut.

"But as I'm not a slave, I don't keep my mouth shut, I still get tossed out, or put into difficult situations but that's my option.

"I would never consider myself an exile, that would be a misuse of the word, but I do empathise. There are many levels of being a stranger in a strange land, which is your own home. But there's a gigantic difference between a person who can't find work in her own country like me, and a person who is not allowed to live in his own country like Adonis (the Arabian poet).

The song-cycle Songs of Exile, which Galás will perform at Hamer Hall on Monday 10 October, features the words of a range of exiled poets including Paul Celan, Henri Michaux and Cesar Vellejo set to music by Galás. She will also perform poems and music by authors and composers who have had to live in exile, away from their homeland.

Galás's work has long been concerned with giving a voice to those who struggle to be heard and this is also the theme of her other Festival performance, Defixiones: Orders from the Dead. This sacred operatic mass is dedicated to the forgotten and erased of the Armenian, Assyrian, and Anatolian Greek genocides, which occurred between 1914 and 1923. The word "Defixiones" refers to the warnings engraved in lead that were placed on the graves of the dead in Greece and Asia Minor. They cautioned against moving or desecrating the corpses under threat of extreme harm.

Galás doesn't believe she has an option about binding politics and music. To her, one's very presence in the universe brings about political consequences, and the question is not 'How do you mix politics and music?' but rather: "How do we prevent it?"

A vociferous gladiator for those who have no voice, Galás has reached critical mass on a range of political issues including HIV/AIDS, genocide and torture. In each case though, there seems to be a personal catalyst to her creations; Galás's brother died of AIDS (the impetus for Plague Mass) and she is directly descended from the Greeks tortured and deported from Turkey last century (the basis for Defixiones).

"These personal experiences have been triggers because since I was very young I found myself on the outside like many people do when they're growing up."

In addition to her personal connections much of Galás's work is also informed by her Greek heritage.

"There's a lot of mystical and touristical writing about it - the octopus fisherman and all those things - but they don't write about the Greek personality, which is extremely tough and rigorous and alternates between the oriental (the feminine) which is the beauty, mourning and lyricism, and stoicism which is as hard as rock. Something that says you do not show any emotion when your enemy comes to the table. There's an alternation between these two things and the Greeks are driven crazy by them so there's a lot of that in my work."

While this duality might be driving the Greeks mad, Galás's own teachers have been pulling at their hair, often inquiring: why can't you just sing some nice opera songs?

"My answer to that is I love Mozart, I love Bellini, I've worked on this music for years. I will be singing this music in my concerts as well as my own music. This definitely will happen, it hasn't happened thus far because there've been so many things that I felt were imperative, whether they be moral imperatives or artistic imperatives I just felt I needed to say them. Often we say things because we don't see them being said elsewhere. Unfortunately I haven't seen that certain things have been said that I thought needed to be said."

Defixiones: Orders from the Dead will be performed on Fri 7 Oct at 8pm at the Arts Centre, Hamer Hall. Click here for more details.

Songs of Exile will be performed on Mon 10 Oct at 8pm at the Arts Centre, Hamer Hall. Click here for more details.