Dance Festival Grounds to Be Built by 2019
On August 1, the board of the Estonian Song and Dance Celebration Foundation met to discuss the future of dance celebrations and decided that separate dance festival grounds will have to be built by 2019.
"In 2019, 85 years will have passed from the first Estonian Dance Celebration. Considering this, it would be symbolic to build separate festival grounds for the dancers, just like the Song Festival Grounds were built for song celebrations in the past," said the chairwoman of the board of the Estonian Song and Dance Celebration Foundation Laine Randjärv.
"In the interest of smooth organization and the unity of the celebrations, it would make sense to build the dance festival grounds in the near vicinity of the current Song Festival Grounds, so that the audience and the participants would be able to derive maximum enjoyment from the merged celebrations," she added.
According to Minister of Culture Rein Lang who participated in the board meeting, the ministry also sees the general area of the Song Festival Grounds as one of the possible locations for holding the 2019 dance celebration, with the necessary infrastructure to be built by that time.
"We are currently brainstorming ideas in order to arrive at the final solution and it would be nice if architects and engineers contributed to this discussion as well," said Lang.
Randjärv noted that a temporary solution will have to be found when organizing the 2014 festival. "It's the song and dance celebration for adults which will have even more participants than this summer's youth celebration. That is why the 2014 song and dance celebrations cannot take place on the same festival grounds as they did this year," said Randjärv. Since the new dance festival grounds cannot be built in time, one of the well-maintained sports arenas in Tallinn will have to be used, she said.
The board extended the deadlines of the competitions for finding the conceptual designs and artistic directors for the 26th song celebration and the 19th dance celebration that take place in 2014. The new deadline for submitting the necessary documents is November 1, 2011.
Sigrid Maasen