Broken Hallelujah

Diamanda Galás: Defixiones, Orders from the Dead.

A haunting work of mourning and catharsis, Galás commemorates victims of a long-forgotten Turkish ethnic cleansing. It premieres in New York City September 8 and 10, at 8pm, then begins a worldwide tour.

Iconoclastic vocalist, pianist, composer, and performance artist Diamanda Galás, returns to New York to perform her most ambitious and compelling work to date. An operatic, sacred mass, “Defixiones, Orders from the Dead” is a sweeping work of historical memory that excavates the Armenian, Assyrian, Anatolian, and Pontic Greek genocides that occurred between 1914 and 1923.

A 75-minute, highly theatrical spectacle scored for voice, piano and tape, Defixiones draws its name from the small lead charms engraved with curses and placed by relatives on graves throughout the Eastern Mediterranean to discourage desecration. Concerned with the poet/author living in exile-- away from their homeland or within it-- the work speaks for individuals who were treated and lived as outlaws, as Galás calls homosexuals,. Mostly composed by Galás herself, who drew from a wide range of sources, Defixiones is rooted in the rich musical worlds of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires.

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