Diamanda Galás to Perform at Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago

Diamanda Galás, known for her haunting operatic voice with a three-and-a-half octave range, is returning to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Stage in Chicago for two concerts. Galás has a uniquely powerful stage presence and is known for addressing themes of suffering, condemnation, and injustice in her music. For these rare solo concerts, she performs a selection of songs for voice and piano, including several new works, along with blues covers and songs from her 1989 Masque of the Red Death trilogy.

She originally performed and recorded these songs to bring attention to the daily struggles of people living with AIDS. The concerts are presented in conjunction with the MCA exhibition “This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s”. Galás performs Thursday, February 23, and Saturday, February 25, 2012 at the MCA Stage.

The new works focus on illness and death and include topics based on poems by various writers, such as a death poem recited at actress Marlene Dietrich’s funeral, a man and a woman walking through a cancer ward, a man dragging his dead best friend through Paris, and an Italian poet’s suicide note.

Galás is known for her politically charged works. She also incorporates influences from traditional Greek and Middle Eastern vocal techniques. Her cult status spans more than three decades and she was last presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2007 when she performed two concert programs, “Songs of Exile” and “Guilty, Guilty, Guilty”.

Galás was raised in southern California and has lived in New York City since 1989. From an early age, she studied classical music, jazz music and voice. She played in her father’s New Orleans-style jazz band, and performed solo piano with the San Diego Symphony at the age of 14. In 1979, she performed at the Festival d’Avignon in France as the lead in Globokar’s opera Un Jour comme un autre, based on the arrest and torture of a Turkish woman for alleged treason. Since then, Galás’ work has attacked various organizations for their indifference to social injustices, including challenging the Roman Catholic Church about its stance on AIDS at a live recording of her 1991 album Plague Mass at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York. Other albums include The Masque of the Red Death (1989), Malediction and Prayer (1998), and La Serpenta Canta (2004). She has collaborated with artists from around the globe and from various genres, including avant-garde composer Iannis Xenakis and Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones.

Events:

Diamanda Galás “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” takes place Thursday, February 23, and Saturday, February 25, at 7:30 pm at the MCA Stage, 220 East Chicago Avenue. Tickets are $35 and a limited quantity of $10 student tickets is available. The MCA Box Office is at 312.397.4010 or www.mcachicago.org. One free museum admission is granted with an MCA Stage ticket stub, valid up to seven days after the performance.

Schrei 27 Film Screening takes place on Friday, February 24 and Sunday, February 26, 1-4 pm, at the MCA Theater.
Made by Davide Pepe and Diamanda Galás, a 27 min. film on continuous loop will be screened. Intense vocal performances are edited with moments of silence intended to reflect the state of a patient subjected to torture through chemical or mechanical manipulation of the brain. There is a high density of the atypical speech and vocal signal processing that Galás has been researching since 1979.