The "Singing Revolution" and the Estonian Song and Dance Festival with Maris Hellrand

In this episode we speak with a representative from Estonia's quinquennial Song and Dance Festival one of the largest of its kind in the world. Maris shares personal memories of how students in the late 1980s stood up to Soviet uniformed authorities and refused to stop singing. We address:

• what differentiates this festival from others of its kind?
• what place this festival has in the collective memory and identity of Estonians?
• How has recent global instability and the conflict over Ukraine impacted the festival?
• where does mass singing come from and what effect does it have on the body and mind?

The Estonian Song and Dance Festival, the largest of its kind in Europe, with over ten thousand dancers and thirty thousand choral singers, is an astonishing presentation of mass from one of the smallest ethnostates in the world, with just over one million in size. An incredible display of minority nationalism and cultural perseverance, this festival has its roots in the Lutheran choral traditions imprinted here by Baltic German settlers, the descendants of the Teutonic Knights of the medieval crusades. Dating back far before the more familiar mass demonstrations of totalitarian states, these jaw dropping exercises in coordination and harmonizing are an index of how communal singing is a key mark of personal uplift and social bonding especially in days of the scarring and even erasure of the civic by so-called social media. (Maybe it should be called unsocial or even antisocial media.) Whether digital dislocation or anxieties due to the poked Russian bear next door knocking closely on the door, this year's affair sold out in record time.

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