In the shade of Ukrainian “Roses”

Recently one of Ukraine’s best-known music bands, the freak cabaret Dakh Daughters, set out on a European tour.

Their very first act, as participants in the play Antigone in Limoges, France, was a great success. However, the true apotheosis came during the four days at the Vienna festival (Wiener Festwoche), one of the oldest (dating back from 1951) and most influential cultural events in Austria. Every night, May 14 through 17, our girls appeared on the podium of the Vienna art pavilion in the prestigious Museum Quarter, with their program “Roses.”

This is how Maryna Davydova, coordinator of the festival’s theater programs, describes the atmosphere of these performances: “I do not follow Eurovision, but on the whole I have a fairly adequate idea of the level of what happens there. And this is what I would like to say. It was not Stockholm but Vienna that saw a true, unconditional victory of Ukrainian culture, because yesterday, in the framework of the Wiener Festwochen, Dakh Daughters appeared here with their freak cabaret ‘Roses.’ It was long ago that I saw such a stunning, overwhelming success, with stamping and cries ‘bravo’ over the full house. It was an incredible show.”

Meanwhile, on Thursday Dakh Daughters played a concert in Magdeburg, Germany, at the local festival called Wilder Osten (“The Wild East”).

Photo by Mykola TYMCHENKO, The Day

The girls band Dakh Daughters has been active for four years now. Their videos get thousands of views in the net; the sarcastic “Roses/Donbas” spurted to the fore, having gathered an audience of nearly 900,000 viewers.

The band is the project of producer and director Vlad Troitsky, the founder of the Dakh Theater. The girls are actresses of Troitsky’s theater, but they also have worked in other formations: Nina Harenetska is a member of the ethnoquartet DakhaBrakha, Ruslana Khazipova plays in the cult rock band Perkalaba, Tania Havryliuk has a solo project “TaniaTania,” Solomia Melnyk is one of the Potuzhni Divchata (“Mighty Girls”), Hanna Nikitina is from Cabaret-Chanson, Natalia Halanevych and the girl known as Zo both dance in the ballet BizoN. Seven vocalists and a dozen instruments, from piano and drums to harmonica to cello.

Dakh Daughters define their style as freak cabaret. Freak means weird or ugly, but this is tautology: from its origin, cabaret includes elements that deviate from the norm. It would be a mistake to perceive it purely as a light variety/erotic revue. We would like to remind that entire art trends were born inside cabaret: Dadaism (and consequently, surrealism) would have been impossible without Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, where artists and poets who later became classics of the 20th century, set their scandalous performances. Toulouse-Lautrec drew inspiration from the atmosphere of Moulin Rouge. In Germany, cabaret had its own theoretician, Otto Julius Bierbaum. Together with the Baron Erich Ludwig von Wolzogen, the founder of the Buntes Theater in Berlin, he dreamed of using such establishments for no lesser purpose than the shaping of the Nietzschean Superman.

Cabaret, with its syncretism of genres, comes close to theater. It organically combines music, poetic recital, dance, provocative performance, as well as the ugly and the beautiful, the hilarious and the touching, the intelligent and the mad. Dakh Daughters fit in this contrasting esthetics. The girls in bizarre or sexy outfits, with white made-up faces, resembling sad clowns, present the most grotesque stuff with utmost seriousness. But they do not limit themselves to grotesque: they also have acts based on the poetry of Iosif Brodsky and the OBERIU poet Aleksandr Vvedensky; their repertoire includes an ancient Provencal song “J’ai vu le loup, le renard, le lievre” and a tribute to Vika Vradii; in the “Roses” you hear the lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 35.

Maybe it was unintentionally, due to their gut feeling, that Troitsky and his protegees were able to identify a vacant niche on the Ukrainian music scene and fill it more than spectacularly. So far we have yet another proof of demand for such spectacles even in the quite saturated landscape of European culture.