Theorizing festival programs as manifestos: the international folklore festival Baltica during the Singing Revolution (1987-1991)

ENThe International Folklore Festival Baltica was founded at the dawn of the Singing Revolution to be celebrated annually in a different Baltic republic (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) under the flagships of kinship, authenticity, and Baltic unity. Existing literature has explored this festival in the fields of folkloristics, ethnomusicology, cultural heritage, and performance studies. However, the analysis of Baltica festival programs remains under-researched. This article presents a conceptual proposal for interpreting the discourse of festival programs as manifestos legitimizing the history, heritage and knowledge of a festival community under censorship. Through the prism of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), and the categories of authority and mythopoiesis, it unravels discursive mechanisms that reaffirm cultural, national, and a collective Baltic identity, and ground the enactment of discourse in social practice and performance. Keywords: folklore revival, critical discourse analysis, Baltic identity, cultural resistance, symbolic power, legitimation.

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