Diamanda Galás
Acting
Biography
Diamanda Galás is a Greek-American avant-garde dramatic soprano, composer, pianist, organist, performance artist, and painter.
Known For

Count Dracula, a 15th-century prince, is condemned to live off the blood of the living for eternity. Young lawyer Jonathan Harker is sent to Dracula's castle to finalise a land deal, but when the Count sees a photo of Harker's fiancée, Mina, the spitting image of his dead wife, he imprisons him and sets off for London to track her down.
Bram Stoker's Dracula

A horde of rampaging warriors massacre the parents of young Conan and enslave the young child for years on The Wheel of Pain. As the sole survivor of the childhood massacre, Conan is released from slavery and taught the ancient arts of fighting. Transforming himself into a killing machine, Conan travels into the wilderness to seek vengeance on Thulsa Doom, the man responsible for killing his family. In the wilderness, Conan takes up with the thieves Valeria and Subotai. The group comes upon King Osric, who wants the trio of warriors to help rescue his daughter who has joined Doom in the hills.
Conan the Barbarian

A Harvard anthropologist is sent to Haiti to retrieve a strange powder that is said to have the power to bring human beings back from the dead. In his quest to find the miracle drug, the cynical scientist enters the rarely seen netherworld of walking zombies, blood rites and ancient curses. Based on the true life experiences of Wade Davis and filmed on location in Haiti, it's a frightening excursion into black magic and the supernatural.
The Serpent and the Rainbow

This film powerfully documents New York City's gay community's response to the AIDS crisis as they are forced to organize themselves after the government's failure to stem the epidemic. Activists who are interviewed include playwrite Larry Kramer, People With AIDS Coalition co-founder Michael Callen (who died of AIDS in 1994), New York filmmaker and journalist Phil Zwickler, as well as representatives from ACT-UP, Queer Nation and the Gay Men's Health Crisis.
Positive

A 96 minute internet video collage made during a particularly disorientating time.
Sinema

AIDS victims and activists cope with hardship and society’s ignorance.
Silence = Death

Since its inception, performance art provided a forum for those artists whose work challenges the dominant aesthetic and cultural status quo. In "Sphinxes Without Secrets", performers, curators and critics unravel the mysteries of performance art and ponder the world women confront today.
Sphinxes Without Secrets
A documentary about a shocking case of HIV criminalization in Greece.
Ruins

A conceptual live concert by Diamanda Galás, "Plague Mass" continues the themes of the suffering and misery of the infected found in her "Masque of the Red Death" trilogy.
Plague Mass
Her Noise was an exhibition which took place at South London Gallery in 2005 with satellite events at Tate Modern and Goethe-Institut, London. Her Noise gathered international artists who use sound to investigate social relations, inspire action or uncover hidden soundscapes. The exhibition included newly commissioned works by Kim Gordon & Jutta Koether, Hayley Newman, Kaffe Matthews, Christina Kubisch, Emma Hedditch and Marina Rosenfeld. A parallel ambition of the project was to investigate music and sound histories in relation to gender, and the curators set out to create a lasting resource in this area.
Her Noise - The Making Of

A family travels through Egypt in 6 months.
IDn3

Live performance of Diamanda Galas in 1985, released by Target Video. The performance, based on a poem by Charles Baudelaire, devotes itself to the emaraldine perversity of the life struggle in hell.
Diamanda Galas: The Litanies of Satan

This first feature by Amy Greenfield brings to the screen the story of the daughter of Oedipus in an emotionally relentless, visually stunning New Music Film Opera which challenges the conventions of narrative cinema to create a genre of its own. The 2500-year-old drama of the woman who defied the state to bury her brother is transformed through stark, ceaseless movement, haunting sounds and music (including themes from Glen Branca, David Van Tieghem, Elliot Sharp and Diamanda Galas) and words of outcry against our own world's injustice.
Antigone/Rites of Passion

A video designed to challenge existing models of AIDS treatment in our society. Using a collage of elements as well as techniques from video and performance, the themes of mourning, urgency and healing are explored in a poetic and highly charged video. Got Away in the Dying Moments suggests natural alternatives to the current treatments and attitudes that constrain our hearts and minds with respect to the AIDS crisis.
Got Away In the Dying Moments

Second part of Brown's Air Cries 'Empty Water' trilogy.
The Red Thread
Galás is known for her arresting concert performances and has been seen in the Barbican Hall on several occasions. SPILL and the Barbican are proud to present this important film installation which deals with asylum institutionalisation, originally commissioned by New American Radio and the Waker Arts Center in Minneapolis (US). Witness several short performances over the space of twenty-seven minutes alternating extreme high-energy vocal work with absolute silence. These performances reflect the state of a patient subjected to torture through chemical or mechanical manipulation of the brain, kept in a confined space with periodically or randomly triggered bright light, heat, beatings or rapes. There is a high density of speech-sound over time which is often machine-like in its velocity. The work employs the atypical speech and vocal signal processing that Galás has been researching since 1979.
Schrei 27

Rare VHS tape of Diamanda Galás performing in 1993.