Dakh Daughters Capsule Review

I guarantee that Dakh Daughters is the most thrilling all-female Ukrainian folk-punk cabaret band you will see this year.

Playing at the York Theatre January 15-19^th, Dakh Daughters put on an exhilarating show. They seamlessly blend Ukrainian folk, hip-hop, punk, a polished cabaret performance style, and in one case reggae influence to astonishing effect. Each of the six performers is a talented vocalist, trained actor, and multi-instrumentalist. The songs range wildly in subject matter and tone, from a half-roared rap about smashing a lover’s apartment, to a coy song about kittens where the singer managed to channel Kate Bush.

It feels strange to listen to such powerfully kinetic music comfortably seated in the very clean York. Although the acoustics of the venue are fantastic and allow the complexity of the Daughters’ musical arrangements to shine, I felt too passive sitting so far from the stage. I would love to experience the show again in a tiny club standing two feet from the performers, dancing and sweating along with them.

I suspect that much of the political context of the show is lost on Vancouver audiences, distanced as we are from the upheaval in the Ukraine. The final song in the show is a reggae-infused number where the women all play in vintage-style bathing suits and one woman plays the rubber duck. It is tongue-in-cheek, playful and quite funny, but the women stop briefly to explain that the song is an allegorical protest of the 2014 annexation of Crimea. The Daughters’ comedy (and there are plenty of laughs in the show) is a comedy of resistance, dark and never safe. 

Throughout the show the women work beautifully together as a unit. The Weimar cabaret-style costumes have slight variations communicating a specific character or personality to each woman within the group – they have been compared to the Spice Girls but with good songs. Throughout the performance, the women support one another and move gracefully in and out of the spotlight. The songs are arranged so that each individual plays a tiny part, and together they create a magnificently complex whole. For one song the cello line is simply two repeating notes while a singer alternates between three notes, another woman plays two notes on a glockenspiel, and so on. In less skilled hands music with this many small parts could sound like free-play at a toddler music class, but the Daughters’ combination of fastidious preparation and blinding skill creates a performance where the whole is vastly greater than the sum of each individual part. Making collaboration so central to the show reinforces the political impact of the performance. These are women working together under unreasonable circumstances in a country under attack, risking becoming enemies of the state, to build community, to help people feel less alone, and to create something beautiful. The result is hugely inspiring and enormously entertaining.