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a sunny Sunday morning in NYC, for the visitors of this site, I asked Diamanda Galas about her
concentration in both on-stage and recorded performance and if she would
share a technique and/or visualization that is utilized.
I also asked her to speak about something she has had to overcome.
Diamanda Galas :
1 Let's start with the biggest question
for me right now- live performance. I am happy to answer this honestly
for you Jarboe, and for your audience, because in my journalistic
interviews I have preferred a bit of a distance. This issue is also
quite pertinent to my current physical circumstances and those of
friends I have known who performed in less than ideal physical circumstances.
2 In the last years I have had occasion
to tour while taking interferon treatment for Hep C; what was most
difficult at that time was the emotional level the interferon would
create onstage, a level that was too personal to maintain a professional
level of performance. In other words, it would drive me to a state
of depression that would make it difficult to keep singing. As I
am NOT a performance artist, I do not aspire to break into tears
just to show that my sentiment is authentic. But the interferon
was trying to drive me into that place.
3 What I would have to do in order
to successfully complete a song onstage when this would happen,
would be to bite down and try to concentrate on being a professional,
who is not paid to "feel ANYTHING," but paid to sing well.
I would get as cold as possible and get the song done. The usual
joy one feels at being able to feel these things onstage ---given
all the times one is able to feel little more than escaping the
fucking gig (when it is badly produced-- less and less the case,
thankfully)--is perverted into an all-out war AGAINST the meaning
of the words. However, this concentration is the same discipline
as that which playing crappy gigs forced me in the past to galvanize
towards my rescue. Either to sing in the face of a sound system
that makes you sound like a rodent lost in a typing pool [any journalist
who reads this and uses it against me owes me a month day job---and
that means YOU, too, whatever your name - Faith No More's limberdick
singer that uses my own quotes against me, while coming to all my
gigs like a parasite]... to sing in the face of a drunk who talks
during the whole set, and still mean what you are singing, or to
sing in the face of an entire group of people who are telling you
to shut the fuck up.
4 It is the cold steel approach.
5 I am a bit nervous about this now
because I am taking a drug cocktail of ribavarin and time-release
interferon and getting ready for three months of touring. When the
drugs don't get you thinking about blowing your brains out they
have you wanting to do the same to others....they make you very
sick and very anemic and they make you sleep sometimes 12 hours
a day. So a world tour, starting out in St Petersberg and Moscow
is quite a leap. But we avantgarde singers (sic)(hah hah) still
have to pay the rent. Especially we avantgarde singers with loving
record companies who prefer to get their backcatalogue sales going
as quickly as possible, if you get me. It is definitely time for
all of us with illnesses to threaten these guys that "no sales
in THIS life, no sales in the NEXT."
6 So to reiterate, the issue of concentration
on this tour will, with any luck, remind me of the concentration
of Michael Callen, or David Wojnarowicz, when they had to move around
and do shows, or Doctor Brad Truax, who was sick with AIDS and practiced
full time since there were so many others who cared in l986, or
my friend radical schoolteacher Carl Valentino, who worked fulltime
with a cot in his office,so he could sleep at lunch just to finish
out the day. And when I think of people like THAT, with no hope
at all to speak of, my little job should become less dire to me,
and my level of concentration should rise, as I have said--- quoting
from my infinitely more heroic brother Philip--- "like the
phoenix."
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