Folklore in Contemporary Performance: Intertextual and Intermedial Negotiations in the Baltic-Nordic Context
Folklore in Contemporary Performance: Intertextual and Intermedial Negotiations in the Baltic-Nordic Context

Summary/Abstract: This article examines how contemporary performance artists in the Baltic–Nordic region reinterpret folklore through cultural memory, mythmaking, and embodied storytelling. It focuses on three case studies: Simona Orinska’s Bearman (2018), Anna Maskava’s Ancestral Body (2024–2025), and the collaborative performances by Katri Kainulainen and Maximilian Latva (2018–ongoing). Drawing on approaches from performance studies, folklore research, and cultural memory theory, the analysis explores how ritual motifs, mythic figures, and symbolic objects are mobilized as sites of negotiation between tradition and contemporaneity. Orinska reconfigures the bear ritual as a liminal and intercultural performance; Maskava transforms mythic archetypes through feminist and ecological perspectives; while Kainulainen and Latva employ shamanic symbolism and puppetry to address trauma and collective memory. These practices demonstrate that folklore, far from being a static cultural legacy, functions as a dynamic and politically charged field of re-signification, continually reactivated through embodied and intermedial performance. By situating these artworks within the broader Baltic– Nordic context, the study argues that performance art sustains folklore’s cultural relevance and symbolic agency, transforming it into a living medium for reimagining authenticity, identity, and belonging.

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