Defixiones, Will and Testament: Orders from the Dead (review)

Defixiones, Will and Testament: Orders from the Dead, Diamanda Galás's latest work for solo voice and piano, is a radical and exacting working through of language, voice and memory. Traversing at least five languages (English, German, French, Arabic, and Greek) Galás borrows from the texts of exiled poets as diverse as Siamanto, Henri Michaux, Adonis, Césare Vallejo, Paul Celan, and Gérard de Nerval. She also employs musical styles ranging from the rembeticka songs of Sotiria Bellou to the blues music of American musicians Bosie Stuyvesant and Blind Lemon Jefferson, and the sacred songs of the deep south, to create a disorienting present—a present haunted by ghosts.

Dedicated to the "forgotten and erased" of the Armenian, Assyrian, and Anatolian Greek genocides that occurred between 1914 and 1923, Defixiones unsettlingly refuses to forget. "Defixiones" refers to the engraved admonitions that were placed by relatives on the graves of the dead in Greece and Asia Minor warning people against desecrating them. "Will and Testament" refers to the last wishes of the dead who have been taken to their graves under extreme circumstances.

As the piece opens, the house lights dim; the theatre grows completely dark, except for the stage which is illuminated only by three tiered candelabras at the back, evoking chapel memorials. Electronically prerecorded music slowly fills the void but the music fades as Galás, shrouded in the black customary to mourning, enters the stage. Galás is, as ever, a gothic vision. Her characteristic long black tresses are concealed under a translucent black veil that shrouds her head and neck before cascading down her body. Piercing the silence with unaccompanied and wordless shards of voice, Galás takes what is witnessed as pure noise and transforms it into aching lament. The lament dissolves into a long, meticulously evolving passage that begins in the harrowing Armenian killing-field of Siamanato's "The Dance" before interweaving excerpts from other works that are periodically interspersed with taped voice-overs. Galás performs unaccompanied except for these disembodied voices, prerecorded on tape, that haunt the scene/seen. Transcending the limits of human voice, Galás brings the dead alive, makes them come alive precisely as dead.

The dead are perhaps nowhere more present than in the interlude between the two sections of the performance. With the stage emptied, and the flickering light of the candelabras extinguished, an enigmatic cloud of dust, illuminated by a single shaft of light, began falling in a perfect stream from above the stage and slowly widened. For close to five minutes the stream (like sand in an hourglass) continued to flow, almost inaudibly except for the faint hissing sound of a gritty breeze. However, this is only grasping after materiality since after all of that time no substance accumulated on the floor. (But this ghostly effect is entirely dependent upon the materiality of the sand, suspended in a bag above the stage, that escaped through a small hole piercing the bag—sand, made of rock, bounced and imperceptibly dispersed when it hit the stage.) "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust."

But the dead refuse to rest and that is why the performance continues. When Galás reappears on stage she has shed her veil. While reassuming her place at the piano the stream of dust seemed to flow toward her, enveloping Galás in a ghostly sort of commingling. If the first section of the performance operates around themes of mourning and grieving loss, the second section seems to offer a response haunted by the rising up of the dead. The dead return because they are not properly buried. Galás's voice has become the medium through which the 'living dead' return to settle symbolic accounts. Countering threats of erasure, the second set begins on a resurrection, "Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold Me Down." As the set develops, Gal&aacute...