The pandemic prevented the Dakh Daughters from performing at the Festival international de musique contemporaine de Victoriaville (FIMAV) in 2020, but Vladimir Poutine will certainly not stop them on their way to Bois-Francs. On May 19, the all-female ensemble that updates Ukrainian folklore and popular songs by marrying them to cabaret music, jazz and contemporary music will defend their country with art, assures the actress, singer and cellist Natalka Halanevych during an interview with To have to from Normandy, where the Daughters are putting on not one, but two new shows.
The first, the one they will present at FIMAV, has been baptized Ukraine in fire (Ukraine on Fire), “an adapted version of the concert that we presented since the release of the last album”make-upreleased in February 2021. This new version, which necessarily takes into account the invasion led by the Russian army since February 24, includes songs from their three albums — Yew (2016) and AIR (2019) and the most recent — and new music accompanying unpublished texts recently written by the musicians.
The work of the Dakh Daughters is all the more urgent today in that it aims precisely to revalorize this Ukrainian culture that the Russian authorities seek so much to obliterate from history through the war they are inflicting on the people of the country.
“Drawing on the traditional and folkloric repertoire of Ukraine underlines the spiritual dimension of our approach,” says Natalka. We seek to revive texts written long ago, but in a contemporary context. Not to change its meaning, but to give it one again. And if we adapt texts from elsewhere — those of Kipling, for example — to music from Ukraine, it is to underline the links that unite us with other European peoples. A very important thing that this war demonstrates is how essential it is to show humanity between peoples, because we share the same values as those who support us. »
An artistic front
The other production Dakh Daughters is working on today is called Dance of Death and will premiere on June 16 at the Théâtre de l’Odéon in Paris. “It’s a project we’ve been thinking about for a year already, explains the one we nicknamed Bida. We were already thinking about this concept of work in connection with our attitude towards death. Before February 24, our reflections were rather abstract; obviously, they have become clearer in the face of the tragic events unfolding in our country. »
“You could say that this show has become much more documentary than what we had imagined before, although it remains an artistic gesture”, continues Natalka, explaining that she has composed new songs from their texts and messages that their loved ones have published on Facebook in recent weeks “in which they bear witness to the terrible and tragic events they are experiencing. It is important for us to tell this war through art; for the moment, we will live the experience with the European public, but we hope to be able to present this show soon in Ukraine”.
Singing, dancing and performing are not in vain for these artists from Ukraine. “Obviously, there is a militant dimension in everything we do, since, before being actresses, we are citizens, underlines Natalka. We make committed art, we constitute an artistic front, because when we see how our army fights against an enemy ten times greater in number, we cannot remain indifferent. Founded about ten years ago by musicians and actresses who are members of the Dakh theater company, in the heart of kyiv, Dakh Daughters is used to carrying out several artistic projects at the same time: one of the musicians is also part of the punk group Perkalaba, another of the folk fusion collective DakhaBrakha (performing July 15 at the Festival d’été de Québec), with which Bida’s husband, Marko Halanevych, is also collaborating, currently on tour in the United States while she prepares the concerts of the Daughters and takes care of their two young daughters. The Dakh theatre, inaugurated in the mid-1990s, is the artistic home base for all these projects.
“We form a big family,” says Natalka. Together, we have gone through three important moments in our common history: the Orange revolution [2004-2005]the Maidan revolution [2014], and now this war” which gives weight to their mission: to defend Ukraine with art. So far, the theater has been spared the bombs, confirm Bida and his translator friend Oleg Sosnov, head of cultural projects at the French Institute in Ukraine, invited to join our conversation. “We live ups and downs in the capital, he says to sum up what he has been going through in kyiv since February 24. The situation stabilized all the same; we hear sirens from time to time to warn us of air attacks, but I am staying at home at the moment. »
Oleg serves as a bridge between the Ukrainian and French cultural milieu, because it was he who organized the first concerts of the Dakh Daughters in Paris several years ago. On February 24, Lucie Berelowitsch, director of the Préau, the national drama center of Normandy-Vire, contacted the director of the Dakh, Vlad Troitskyi, and each of the musicians of the Daughters to offer them a refuge and make the Préau available to the artists. Five of them work today in Normandy, another will join them after the American tour; the seventh, Tanya Havrylyuk, chose to stay in the country, with her family.
Bida’s parents did not want to leave their house. “Unfortunately, they live in temporarily occupied territory [par l’armée russe] in the south of the country, but fortunately the situation there is not as dire as it was in Boutcha, further north, or in Mariupol. It’s relative calm, but it must still be terrifying. »
“Help Ukraine”
“For me, it was a painful decision to leave Ukraine”, continues Natalka, holding back her tears and specifying that she wrote a text about it for Dance of Death, “even if it is a feeling difficult to describe in words. For each of us, it was a complex decision that we did not take lightly. We all left Ukraine at the same time, but not on the same path, each through different borders”.
“The main thing is that we are safe today and that we can legally practice our profession, be artists and talk about our lives. This feeling that we are not leaving Ukraine to take refuge, but to work, to be useful, to help Ukraine in a different way, it was important for all of us. Of course, we all feel guilty, as does every Ukrainian citizen who thinks he is not doing enough and wonders what more he could do. But all this work ahead of us and these projects that we are carrying out help us to lessen this feeling of guilt that inhabits us and convinces us that we are also defending Ukraine, in our own way. »
Dakh Daughters will be at FIMAV on May 19. The 38and edition of the festival takes place in Victoriaville from May 16 to 22.