The Piano as Guillotine and Other Joys of Diamanda Galás - Theatro Circo

“Galas is capable of piercing the molecular structure of a room.”

Diamanda Galás does not merely interpret songs; the American artist reterritorializes them.

This Saturday at Theatro Circo and Wednesday at Casa da Música, Diamanda Galás returns after a long absence to remind us that a scream is a form of complicity. The avant-garde artist brings us wounds and bandages in the form of music. Unmissable, of course.She is capable of piercing the molecular structure of a room.

It is an experience that oscillates between reified agony and an almost unbearable spiritual clarity, in which the Portuguese audience—usually given to a passive melancholy—is suddenly injected with a rage that is, at once, both wound and remedy.

This is not music for relaxation; it is an existential transaction in which we pay for someone to remind us that a scream is, in fact, a form of complicity.

Pain is what remains to us; it may be the only authentic thing we have left.

This was a liturgy of violence and suffering that left us wondering whether the ticket was for a concert—or for a live, real-time autopsy.