Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the author of the award-winning “Goodbye Globalization” and a regular columnist for POLITICO.
Every five years, Estonians put on an extraordinary show: the Song and Dance Festival (Laulu- ja Tantsupidu). Featuring some 43,000 performers of traditional song and dance, mostly dressed in national habits, plus nearly a thousand musicians and some 80,000 audience members, this remarkable show of culture and unity is not a new phenomenon — it has (mostly) taken place since 1869.
Occupations and other hardships haven’t stopped it. And when it took place again this year, during the first week of July, the performers and audience members were undeterred by unremitting rain.
The Song and Dance Festival is a perfect reminder that countries can have a strong national identity and collectively nurture it, and that they can do so entirely peacefully. It also demonstrates that a nation can be strong and resolute while posing no threat.
On the afternoon of July 5, I sat down with Estonia’s Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna at this year’s festival. However, the purpose of our meeting was not to discuss politics. It was to discuss the power of communal singing and dancing.
Tsahkna arrived wearing a hat and sash that identified him as a member of the Korp! Sakala student society. The foreign minister sings in the group’s choir, and like 45,000 other Estonian singers and dancers, he had just completed a 5-kilometer procession from central Tallinn to the Song and Dance Festival grounds — in the pouring rain.
Once on the grounds, he and the other performers were able to take a short break. Most of them headed to the vast food hall, where members of the Women’s Voluntary Defence Organization were serving soup and bread, with 46,000 meals cooked just outside the hall on army field stoves.
It was remarkable to see hundreds of Estonians in their national habits civilly file in, eat their soup and put their trays away before making way for the next wave of the procession. All told, 32,022 singers and 10,938 dancers would arrive that afternoon, all braving the route and rain. They then sang — all of them, in the pouring rain — joined by an audience of tens of thousands. The following day, they performed again, this time joined by an audience of some 58,000, enjoying the music from the lawn, under the pouring rain once again.
“The Song and Dance Festival demonstrates our societal resilience,” observed Tsahkna, who has sung since age seven and participated in several festivals. “Estonia had a culture minister in the 1990s, who said ‘now that we have independence, we don’t need the Song and Dance Festivals anymore.’ He didn’t last long.”
The minister in question was also demonstrably wrong. The Song and Dance Festival may have brought about Estonia’s singing revolution in 1988 and its subsequent independence from the Soviet Union, but it isn’t political: Since the beginning, it has simply been about singing and dancing together.
This year, just as every time, the event featured choral singing of the highest caliber, with folk songs performed both in their traditional iterations and newer variations. Countless hours of practice had gone into the elaborate routines. Among the spectators, I spotted former Prime Minister Andrus Ansip saluting the procession and successor Kaja Kallas enjoying one of the songs.
But beyond the artistic and technical skill on display, it was joy that permeated the festival.
That joy is why Estonians keep coming back, and why, in recent years, they’ve been joined by a growing number of diaspora Estonians. This year, more than 500 Global Estonians (as the government calls them) participated as dancers, and more than 30 diaspora choirs sang. Jordan Brodie, a New Mexican singer with an Estonian grandmother, excitedly told me he found himself seated just behind President Alar Kurtis, who delivered the opening address.
During another break, I also spoke with career diplomat Toomas Tirs, who most recently served as ambassador to Kazakhstan. At the festival, he was participating as a dancer. “You have to practice for years to be able to do this,” he said. But the effort is nothing compared to the reward, he added.
“The festival is such an emotional feeling. We Estonians are all together, in unison … It sends the message that this is who we are, that we’re proud of our culture and that we’re valuable.”
The foreign minister felt similarly. “How do we keep our societies together? How do we make sure our citizens feel commitment to the country?” he asked. For him, too, the festival provides an answer. Though created to simply perform folk music back in the 1860s, it long ago became an Estonian way of sticking together.
It also dawned on me that a festival of folk music is the best possible way to nurture a country’s national identity: It gathers people from all walks of life for a collective undertaking, and it’s enjoyable, joyful and entirely peaceful.
“Thirty thousand people singing together — that’s Estonia,” said Kadri Tali, a member of the Estonian Parliament, as well as a long-time choral conductor and artistic manager who also conducts the parliament’s choir. “If we didn’t have a national identity, what would be the point of being a country of 1.5 million people?”
Indeed. Without such a strong identity, Estonia might be the sort of territory that, in the eyes of certain large countries, practically deserves to be gobbled up. And while countries have occupied Estonia in the past, by now they ought to have learnt that it is inhabited by a people who share a strong sense of self and unity and are no one’s lackeys.
As in the 1800s, this summer Estonia once again demonstrated it’s a unique country — and one that wishes no ill on anyone. While other countries celebrate with military parades, Estonia does it with song and dance. In the words of its national anthem, which the crowds at the festival grounds energetically sang: “My Fatherland, My Happiness and Joy.”
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