Dash Arts and Ukraine
OUR work with artists from Ukraine from 2013 to today
Our projects in literature, visual art, music and theatre co-created with exceptional Ukrainian artists have mirrored and mapped the country’s tumultuous last 10 years.
CURRENT and upcoming PRODUCTIONS
THe RECKONING
Our upcoming theatre production is inspired by witness testimonies gathered by Ukrainian journalists from survivors of Russian aggression in Ukraine. It will be a compelling work of drama that gives a powerful human face to this international tragedy.
SONGS OF BABYN YAR
A haunting music theatre performance intimately weaving languages, cultures and history to unearth abandoned stories and silenced songs from one of the most devastating periods in Ukraine’s past.
Songs of Babyn Yar is currently available for touring.
PAST PRODUCTIONS
CRIMEA 5am
Crimea 5am brings together voices from an extraordinary community of women, bound together as a result of human rights violations against Crimean Tatars since 2014.
Through personal stories and testimonies of love and struggle in Crimea today, and combining victim and activist interviews, it highlights the stories of 10 political prisoners and their families.
BACKGROUND
The Early beginnings - 2012
Back in 2012, we embarked on a season of work focusing on the experience and legacy of the Soviet Union across the former republics. As a result, our Ukrainian-lens focused largely on the past but as the decade rolled on, our artistic gaze has centred much more on documenting the contemporary Ukrainian experience and what a future might look like.
As a perfect illustration - early in the last decade, we presented the UK premiere of “Haytarma”. Haytarma, made in 2013, depicted the sudden Soviet deportation of Crimean Tatars from Crimea to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in 1941 with a beautiful soundtrack from Eurovision star Jamala. The story of the destruction and exile from their homeland and the return after 1991 as Ukraine gained its independence and invited the Crimean Tatars to return is a foundational story for the community now re-established in Crimea.
At the beginning of 2023, we revisited the region again with Crimea 5am at Kiln, a play written in 2020 exploring the experiences of Tatar political prisoners and their families in Crimea today under Russian occupation, as part of the Ukraine / UK Season of Culture. It felt incredibly poignant to be once again understanding Tatar suffering, this time no longer in its distant past.
MAIDAN - 2013/14
In April 2014, our Artistic Director took a long-planned trip to Kyiv to meet musicians for our Renegade Orchestra production. Although the crowds had dissipated from the Maidan after President Yanukovych had been ousted, it was still occupied with barricades, impromptu kitchen gardens, tanks and tents.
“My young fixer, who escorted me to the meetings and had aspirations to work as an arts producer, pointed out the place behind the ferris wheel where only a few weeks earlier, she’d taken the wires out of television sets to make molotov cocktails.
All the musicians I met that trip told me that their artistic practice had turned into the action of protest over the previous 6 months. It had galvanised a whole generation to re-think their identity and what they wanted for their country.”
- Josephine Burton, Dash Arts Artistic Director
DAKHABRAKHA - 2014
We returned from Kyiv and convinced WOMAD, who had already finished their programming that summer, to book DakhaBrakha as a last minute entry. We presented the band in London then in 2014, and twice more in 2016 and 2017.
“Their exuberant, theatrical contemporary exploration of Ukrainian folk traditions thrilled the festival. Somebody smuggled in some ukrainian flags and my colleague Jeremy took a photo from the stage of tens of thousands of festival goers rocking out to their mesmeric music.”
- Josephine Burton, Dash Arts Artistic Director
2015-2020 - Our collaborations with Ukrainian Artists
Over the next few years, we continued to collaborate with, and present, Ukrainian artists at our Dash Cafes in London and in larger scale Productions.
We explored what it means to live with the legacy of the Soviet Union in Ukraine with Natalka Vorozhbit through her extraordinary play Grainstore in our Ukrainian Dacha at Latitude Festival, Rich Mix and Wandsworth Arts Festival.
And produced podcasts, events and productions with Natalka Vorozhbit, Nikita Kadan, Oksana Zabuzhko, Mariana Sadowska, Yuriy Gurzhy, Olia Hercules and many others.
Olia Hercules, Olesya Zdorovetska, Nikita Kadan and Natalka Vorozhbit in rehearsal, performance and conversation.
“I understood that I had the distinct privilege to watch these incredible Ukrainian artists carve a new identity for their country. In those first few years after Maidan and the occupation of Eastern Ukraine and Crimea, watching from the sidelines, I felt initially that my colleagues and friends were defining an identity that simply wasn’t Russian - a focus on Ukrainian cultural, literary and historical figures and language which had been simply overwhelmed and overlooked due to the dominance of Russian culture and language. And then as the decade rolled on, the artistic work, the writing, poetry and art felt increasingly urgent and powerful - a country that has so much to say for itself and about itself, under threat all the time, fighting to justify its very existence, a country on the edge of all worlds with a distinct creative energy.”
- Josephine Burton, Dash Arts Artistic Director
Songs for Babyn Yar, 2021 - 2022
At the end of 2021, on the cusp of the full scale Russian invasion, we premiered Songs for Babyn Yar in Kyiv. The production was created with 3 brilliant Ukrainian artists: Mariana Sadowska; Svetlana Kundish; Yuriy Gurzhy, working with Josephine Burton and co-dramaturg Yael Shavit.
Through music and storytelling, Songs for Babyn Yar explores the memories and legacy of a horrific massacre of the Jewish community and so many others in the suburbs of Kyiv during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine in 1941. Our work didn’t shy away from some difficult subject matters including the legacy of occasions of Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis.
“The Ukrainian artists had some concerns about the production’s possible reception in Kyiv. We needn’t have been concerned. The audience’s response was thoughtful and considered. Our emotional post-show conversation lasted longer than the performance itself. Most of the audience wanted to share their own personal responses and reflections on the topic. It felt like the country was willing to engage with the difficult elements of nation building and confronting its past.” - Josephine Burton, Dash Arts Artistic Director
2022-2024 Russia’s War in Ukraine
The war between Russia and Ukraine has monopolised everything. The country really is fighting for its existence. Some of the artists we’re worked with are now on the frontline, others have had to flee the country.
We continue to seek ways to document and support Ukrainian artists. We were privileged to be able to support an artist residency for Olya Tkachenko in 2023 with Artists at Risk and Bosla Arts, present Crimea 5am as part of the UK/UKR Season of Culture in 2022-23 and develop a new podcast exploring Isaac Babel.
We are working with The Reckoning Project and Ukrainian playwright Anastasiia Kosodii (co-writer of Crimea 5am) to create a work of The Reckoning, which draws on and is inspired by recently collected testimonies from witnesses of Russia’s War in Ukraine. Their stories of survival during the current war of aggression and terror are extraordinarily powerful.
We continue to learn more and deepen our understanding of the country and its context from every encounter - at Dash Arts, we feel the responsibility to share these stories and Ukraine’s culture, which Russia is so set on destroying, with our audiences in the UK and internationally.
