Many Latvian folk groups, including Tautumeitas, have even learned and begun to perform Ukrainian folk songs too.
Over ice cream and tea at a pizza joint in Rēzekne, a small city in Latvia’s far east, Juris Zalāni, a folk musician and co-founder of a non-profit folk production company called Lauska, explains that after the invasion of Ukraine, he reconnected with a Ukrainian folk musician who had fled her home near the Russian border. Zalāni later hired the musician to help teach Latvian folk groups how to properly pronounce the words to Ukrainian folk songs. The experience, he says, underscored the fragility of the folk tradition and freedom. “It can disappear very fast.”
In early March, in Bērzgale, a tiny town in eastern Latvia, the municipality’s administrative building is abuzz with nervous tension. About 150 Latvian high school and middle school students sit in the auditorium hall awaiting the results of their tryout for the Youth Song and Dance Festival, which will take place this July.
Most of the students haven’t changed out of their dancing costumes. Both boys and girls wear vests over loose white long-sleeve shirts. The girls dressed in long woollen skirts that flowed to their ankles; the boys sported grey trousers. On their feet, many have fastened bast shoes, which are traditionally made of tree bark, up to their lower calves.
Each school’s group have been preparing for this day for months, practicing several times per week, often for up to two or three hours per rehearsal. The scores they receive will determine whether they will dance in front of tens of thousands of spectators at the Mežparka stage in Riga, at the festival’s biggest concert.
The room goes quiet as the judges start to announce the results. Again and again, a pattern repeats: charged silence, then eruptions of cheers and hugs. If one of the groups is unhappy about their score, it isn’t evident by their elated reactions.
Afterwards, the teens swap out their national garb for t-shirts, sweatshirts, and jeans.
Outside, I asked a few of them about how resistance is core to folklore culture and the divisions between the ‘traditional’ sect and stage dancers. They seem pretty uninterested in the political implications of their performance.
“I’m just proud of my team,” says one student named Rihards, whose group have earned a first-place designation, meaning they have a good shot at not only receiving an invite to the festival, but also a prime spot in the concert. Another dancer in his company, Gustavs, adds: “Now we’re sigma.”
This is the next generation of Latvian folklorists. Only thirty-four years post-independence, the country is navigating the challenges of a globalising world, in a complicated geopolitical moment. But as Zalāni, the head of the folklore production non-profit says: “The essence of folklore is that it always changes.”
Jack Styler is a freelance journalist.
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