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.”