Paper Short Abstract:

This paper draws on my PhD research to explore how a multimodal approach profoundly transformed my understanding and theorisation of the nation as an imagined community, as exemplified through an in-depth analysis of music production and performance within La Escena Independiente in Lima, Peru.

Paper Abstract:

In this paper, I will discuss my experience applying a multimodal approach to analyse music performance and explore how this understanding was co-produced with the musicians of La Escena Independiente (Independent Music Scene). I argue that music performance is a means to imagine the nation, affording the participants – musicians and audiences alike – a space to re-produce and co-articulate how they envision community. This idea is inspired by Anderson’s (1983) argument that the act of reading provides the readers with a sense of parallelity and synchronicity.

The methods I implemented included cartography, semi-structured interviews, ethnographic observations and filmmaking. Each method afforded me a different experience as a researcher and impacted my relationships with the participants. The ethnographic observations and filmmaking, in combination with cartography, for instance, allowed me to experience the music performances as socially and geographically situated and understand the importance of positioning the body and movement within the space of the performance. Similarly, the importance of the bodily experience, the throbbing of the music, the smells, the shoving and pushing in the mosh-pit during some concerts or the stillness during others. This experience led me to discuss and analyse how the audience members move through the venue’s physical space to express and negotiate how they envision Peruvianness by echoing the musician’s notions through the embodied experience of proximity, interaction, and socialisation. Consequently, the multimodal approach reshaped my understanding of nation as being imagined through discourse towards being imagined through practice, presence, experience, positioning, movement and stillness.