DakhaBrakha

On 15 May 2026 DakhaBrakha will perform at Melkweg in Amsterdam. The quartet from Kyiv formed in the early 2000s at the avant-garde Dakh theatre and has since developed its own idiom, which they call “ethno-chaos”: traditional Ukrainian songs, rural polyphony and dance rhythms coming together with influences from pop, rock, world music and experimental sounds. Their close collaboration with director Vladyslav Troitskyi gives their performances a pronounced theatrical layer: somewhere between concert and performance, with costumes that reference rituals and a strongly physical stage presence.

Live, DakhaBrakha moves from intimate harmonies to tight percussion, from long-sustained drones to sharp melodic motifs. Their voices carry stories and cadences from the countryside, while the arrangements place those traditions in a contemporary context. After years of touring across Europe, North America and Asia, and working on projects for film, dance and visual art, the repertoire sounds like an open archive: familiar material that is repeatedly reordered and reshaped by the moment. At Melkweg they present a set that treats Ukrainian heritage as working material: living, dynamic and open.