Amid tensions in Eastern Europe, young Latvians are reviving their country’s folk rhythms

On a cold Saturday night in Keķava, Latvia, a band starts to play, then the dancers come out. Outside, the 5,000-person town located 21 kilometres from Riga seems totally dead, but inside municipal museum’s concert hall, the party is just starting.

The folklore veterans – middle-aged couples who synchronise Polka steps and spin each other with ease – are the first out of their seats. Some older couples who seem to be pushing the latter half of their 70s eventually join the core group, albeit moving a bit slower. Then, as the band really hit its stride in the second chorus, a group of teenagers, who have sequestered themselves in the corner, couple up and join in. A tall boy with a mullet wearing a Stüssy hoodie and loose faded black jeans grins sheepishly, looking at his feet, as his partner leads him through the steps.

The moment is literally centuries in the making. Throughout Latvia’s history, which has been dominated by a series of foreign occupations, the folklore movement has been central to national identity and resistance. Today, in the face of globalisation and increasing Russian aggression in the region, it’s is being adopted by new generations of Latvian youth, who are taking the music and dance to bigger stages than ever before.

A candlelit basement in old town Riga is probably home to the most consistently raucous folk party in the country. Every Wednesday, Folkklubs ALA Pargrabs hosts a traditional folk band that plays songs hundreds of years old – and the place goes absolutely wild. 

The owner, Krišjānis Putniņš, says that this was not always the case. Putniņš, who grew up playing in folk bands among the Latvian diaspora community in Australia, says that when he moved to the country of his heritage in 2009, he had expected to be surrounded by fellow folk enthusiasts. “That was sort of the shock moment when I moved to Latvia because I moved here thinking everyone would be into folklore and folk songs. And when I realised: ‘Jesus, almost no one’s into this stuff,’ I was kind of taken aback by it.”

But, according to Putniņš, the 2009 global financial crisis opened the door for an unexpected folk music revival. Real estate in Riga’s old town was cheap enough that Putniņš, at age 21, opened the first iteration of his ALA event.

“That was the point in time when everyone wanted globalisation. They wanted to be like an American,” Putniņš says. “I guess that broke at some point. You realise: ‘wow, it’s gone too far, and we’ve really lost our identity.’”

Then, sometime around 2013, “Dancing in a folk dancing group was cool again. Singing Latvian songs was cool again,” he continues.

Now, the movement has hit the country’s mainstream. During the 2025 Latvian Supernova – during which bands compete to represent Latvia in Eurovision – five of the 20 semi-finalists sang songs that included ethnic references or some element of traditional folk music, including the winning group, Tautumeitas.

Tautumeitas, which translates roughly to ‘folk girls’, won with their song ‘Bur Man Laimi’ (‘Bring me happiness’) The song was the first winner of the Supernova written entirely in Latvian since 2004. It’s rooted in folk melodies but also features soaring, harmonised vocals and twitchy, dramatic drums that aren’t too far removed from FKA twigs’ most recent album.

The six-woman ethnic-pop group say that although they combine both folk and pop elements in their music, they rarely create entirely novel material. Instead, they make songs by reinventing and interpolating the traditional Latvian folk tunes that they’ve heard since childhood.

“We started just from singing a cappella as girls,” says Aurēlija Rancāne, who sings and plays percussion in the group. “Together, slowly, it became what it is today.” Even though the group has been playing together since 2015, they seem to have hit another level in recent years, touring across Europe and playing big-name festivals, like Glastonbury, Imaterial, and Eurosonic.

“We have always been competing and compared with pop music artists which always have bigger budgets, better productions, louder beats, or catchier choruses,” says Asnate Rancāne, a singer and violinist. “This is a big moment for us.”

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Academics studying ethnic music have said that Latvia, and its Baltic neighbours Estonia and Lithuania, ground their national culture in a “folklore paradigm”, and that the region is “obsessed with folklore”. And, like any obsessive, nation-building movement, there is much squabbling over Latvian folklore’s history, traditions, practices, and politics.

Many Latvian folk songs trace as far back as the 12th century. Some have no known origin date at all. Folk bands today, even those that strictly play traditional songs, will often combine Latvian instruments like the kokle – which looks like a small wooden harp turned on its side – with folk music mainstays such as the mandolin, violin, bagpipes, accordion, and piano.

Its folk dancing is built on variations of three main steps: the Polka, the Waltz, and ‘running’, which is, as the name suggests, a sort of rhythmic trot. Sandis Zučiks, a Latvian folk dancer who also leads a project called the Dance Repository, which catalogues traditional dances, says that many folk dances were born out of Latvian serfdom during the Middle Ages. Latvians, who mostly worked as labourers on the estates of German and Polish landowners, observed how the barons danced in the manor houses and tried to replicate it themselves. The result is an alchemy of formal partner dancing and simple moves that seem like they may have been freestyled hundreds of years ago, all tinged with a little Latvian pagan mysticism (the Baltic tribes were some of the last in Europe to be Christianised).

Around the 1930s, Latvian choreographers created a new style of folk dance that was much more physically demanding and incorporated modern choreography. Unlike traditional Latvian folk dancing that was practiced informally, often at parties in the countryside, this new style was meant to be performed on the stage. Naturally, the format became known as ‘stage’ dancing. Under Soviet rule that started in the 1940s, the stage style dominated the dancing community in Latvia while the simpler traditional dances almost died out completely.

In the late ’70s and ’80s, however, a folk revivalist movement emerged as the Soviet Union weakened. These musicians eschewed the Soviet-favoured stage dancing and modern melodies in favour of traditional folklore from the century before. In 1988, at a trans-Baltic folk conference aptly named “Baltica ’88”, local and diaspora Latvian folk groups met to celebrate traditional folklore and displayed the red-white-red Latvian flag, which was officially banned for the first time at a public event under Soviet rule. The next year, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians linked together, forming a human chain hundreds of kilometres long that connected all three Baltic capitals, in an act of unified resistance. The amalgamation of non-violent protests against Soviet rule that led to the independence of all three Baltic states was later dubbed the Singing Revolution.

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Somewhat ironically, given the country’s hard pivot from Russia since independence, the stage variety remains the most dominant and visible form of Latvian folk dance today. It’s practiced in hundreds of schools and clubs around the country, and most visibly, thousands of Latvians come together every five years to perform at the Latvian Song and Dance Festival, which is one of the largest choir and dance festivals in the world. In 2008, UNESCO added the celebration, as well as its Lithuanian and Estonian counterparts, to its Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list.

Today, tensions persist between the ‘traditional’ folklorists and the stage dancers. Yet despite their differences, both camps of the folklore movement have made responding overtures to increasing Russian aggression in the region since the invasion of Ukraine.

In terms of percentage of GDP, Latvia has been the fourth strongest supporter of Ukraine, only trailing Estonia, Denmark, and Lithuania. In Riga, the Ukrainian flag is ever-present: it’s taped in the window of nearly every city bus, hanging in shops, and flying in front numerous government buildings. For many Latvians, standing with Ukraine goes beyond just showing solidarity. Threats from the east feel realer than any time in recent memory. Russian hybrid warfare tactics, such as cyber-attacks, misinformation campaigns, and sabotage of critical infrastructure in the Baltic region have intensified in recent years.

Consequently, some in the folklore movement have leaned back into its political origins.

Alys Daroy, a lecturer in English & Theatre at Murdoch University in Perth who grew up in the Latvian diaspora community, attended the 2023 Latvian Song and Dance Festival. She tells Huck that “there was certainly a diversity of people there for different motivations, but I would say [there was an] overwhelmingly, very strong, palpable political undercurrent”.

Last year, at the diaspora Latvian Song and Dance festival in Toronto, Canada, Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs explicitly linked the folklore movement’s history of resistance to the current moment. “Singing has helped preserve and cultivate Latvian identity both within Latvia during the Soviet occupation and across Latvian communities living in exile all around the world,” he said. “Next week, we will once again discuss the most effective strategies for resisting and stopping Russian aggression in Ukraine so that Europe and Latvia never experience the dark times of more than 80 years ago.”

Leila Rasima, a member of the Latvian Parliament, has participated in the Latvian Song and Dance Festival approximately seven times (she’s lost track of exactly how many at this point). Still an active member of a folk troop, Rasima says that folk “song and dance helped us to keep our traditions and to gain our independence back”. But at the same time, she doesn’t see folklore as occupying the same role that it had in the ’80s. “We feel really secure in our identity and in our culture,” she says. “No matter what America does or what Trump says, we still feel quite sure that we’re going to be fine. But we need to get ready, of course, for a possible attack from Russia. We understand that.”

Ieva Weaver, a Riga-based musicologist and archivist at the University of Latvia, agrees, saying that “it’s now more about resilience than resistance”. Inside the folk movement, Weaver notes, some bands have revamped their repertoires to reflect the current geopolitical moment.

Before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Weaver says that people rarely asked her about Latvian war songs from before Soviet times. “But now suddenly, you need them so acutely, and you understand every word in those war songs,” she says.

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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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