The story
Vaasa Festival in Vaasa
The current Vaasa Festival, launched in 2016 at what is now Elisa Stadium under organizer Nordic Live Productions, combines live music performances with food and wine programming for an adult summer audience. It shares its name, but no organizational link, with an earlier Vaasa Festival that ran from 1968 to the early 1990s as a theatre-focused event.
The name Vaasa Festival has been used by two distinct events roughly three decades apart, complicating any simple account of its history: the earlier event began in 1968 as Itamaren Kesa, or Baltic Sea Summer, a summer festival built around panel discussions and socially engaged theatrical performances that later took the Vaasa Festival name in 1985 and belonged to the Finland Festivals network before winding down in the early 1990s, a period that also saw a separate puppet theatre festival operating in the city under a similar name.