Gaudeamus Baltic Student Song and Dance Festival

Gaudeamus is the international Baltic student song and dance festival, bringing together university choirs, dance ensembles and orchestras from Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and beyond roughly once every five years, rotating among the three Baltic capitals. When it lands in Riga, the city fills with student performers continuing the same UNESCO-recognized song-and-dance-celebration tradition as Latvia's national festival, but built specifically around student and academic ensembles rather than the wider population.

The Baltic states share one of Europe's most distinctive cultural traditions: song and dance celebrations built around mass choirs and folk dance ensembles, a practice that grew through the nineteenth-century national awakenings and later became a form of quiet civic resistance during Soviet rule, when Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians gathered by the tens of thousands to sing in their own languages.