Created by an independent collective of dancers, musicians and visual artists from Ukraine, the performance, directed by Julia Łopata, frames resilience as something practiced in real time, in bodies that keep moving even when history is trying to pin them down.
As an audio-choreographic odyssey built from contemporary dance, live singing and electronic music, Cossachka delivers a tour de force of ritual and ceremony as much as a modern dance spectacle.
The work’s title references legends of women warriors linked to the lands of Ukraine's ancient past, but the piece toys with that mythic echo without turning its performers into heroines.
Instead, it focuses on what it calls “space holding,” the unglamorous labour of continuity in crisis: daily work, keeping memory intact, preserving a sense of self from being overwritten.
In a cultural moment that demands clear villains and shining victors, Cossachka chooses the harder artistic subject - survival as an act of bravery.
The performance is steeped in a reality in which, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many Ukrainian women have volunteered for military service while others have thrown themselves into activism, aid work and community organising.
Cossachka draws from that landscape without staging battle scenes. War is present as pressure, as interruption, as a presence that cuts into ordinary life, necessitating individuals' evolution into warrior personas, but the piece looks at crisis through a female gaze which is interested in defense as much as in inheritance: what gets preserved, what gets passed on, what must be ultimately rebuilt.
Solomiya Kyrylova’s singing acts as a kind of bridge between the work’s elements. There are passages where language loosens its grip and the sound becomes something closer to a private language: syllables that seem invented on the spot, speech-like but untranslatable, as if meaning is being carried by breath, rhythm, and intent rather than by words.
It fits the piece's preoccupation with memory, motherhood, and continuity, while the electronics extend the atmosphere rather than dictating it, creating a soft pressure field in which gestures can register as choices, not decoration.
If the work has a thesis, it is stated through the narrative but also, probably more importantly, through accumulation.
Layers of snapshots, spotlights onto the blacked out stage, combine into a picture of an archetypal woman, imagined as a vessel of memory and a keeper of history, someone whose power is everywhere. It may be concealed, but in the end it is unmistakable.
The performance does not ask the audience to agree with these images as doctrine but their sheer power pushes you to consider their consequences: what it means to carry life forward in a world that continues to insist on catastrophe.
The production has already proven it can reach audiences on its own terms. The 2023 premiere in Kyiv sold out, despite being independently marketed and promoted. In 2024, Cossachka received a nomination for the GRA, a major Ukrainian theatre award, in the category of best dance performance.
The project is now scheduled to travel further.
From a dispassionate perspective, Cossachka reads as evidence.
Dramaturg Paul Bargetto commented "the piece is centered on the female warrior myths related to the Cossacks, and given that the current war in Ukraine is literally etched into their voices and bodies, this performance has a powerful resonance, not only in terms of myth, but also as testimony."
The piece does not flatten war into imagery, and it does not turn women into symbols. It offers something rarer: a staged ritual of attention, where the bodies become an open archive, and Kyrylova’s voice, wordless when it needs to be yet perfectly understandable, carries a song of strength, survival and ultimate triumph.
(rt/gs)