Experience Blog 2

Just a Q-pop stan over here

Oh what a week it’s been since the last experience blog! So much sensory overload but still the Q-pop concert is living rent free in my mind. Prior to the show, when I was interviewed for the livestream they asked me what I was expecting. I told them I had no idea what I was walking into but I was ready to be surprised, and I was surely pleasantly surprised. I was losing energy as the openers dragged on, but once LENIN made an appearance I was invigorated. 

I was struck in LENIN’s opening speech when he said with an in passing casualty that it’s difficult to make art with culture in Peru. I assumed the culture he meant was Quechua and the Korean influences of his work, but I was left wondering, what is then the culture-less work that does get produced? Is the hybridity of his work or the indigeneity/foreignness of his work the issue for production? 

Throughout the concert I enjoyed the acoustic versions of the song, brimming with a sentimentality that transcended language and communicating the emotion of Andean music and history. But I was fully enveloped in the full performances of the concert, partially because I love k-pop and because dance is one of my favourite artistic mediums. 

South Korea has tremendous iconographical strength in their cultural exports, and it was cool to see the far-reaching influence of a subculture. Similar to LENIN, I find such freedom in the energetic sound of k-pop. When the audience members came up to dance at the end, I initially thought it was just a free for all, but then they started doing the official dance and it reminded me a lot of idol culture I experienced in Seoul and Bangkok back in February. Dancing in queer k-pop clubs in Seoul I thought I would be able to just dance as I felt appropriate to the beat-regimented tunes but everyone was doing the official choreography and serving. A few weeks later, I experienced the same level of performance factor at a gay club in Bangkok.

I’m no dancer by training, but I’ve been a competitive artistic swimmer (synchronized swimming) for a combined thirteen years of my life so I would consider myself to structurally understand dance. As a very regimented person, I’m an appreciator of technique, but the movement beyond the counts is when I think dance becomes emotionally transporting. I was in complete awe of Yarissa, the female backup dancer. The male dancer had a great grasp of precision in his articulations, but my eyes were fully drawn to Yarissa. I was mesmerized by how she was such a spatiotemporal presence. She utilized vertical space with such voletic intentionality, made even more impressive by her small build. She expertly hit each movement on the first letter of the count and harnessed concentric movement to connect her counts with simultaneous power and precision. Overall, a phenomenal dancer. The choreography was also so interesting to me. The music was in the typical 1-8 count pattern. The majority of the chorus choreography occurred on a single count (movement of on each count), double count (movement on 1,3,5,7), quadruple count (movement commences on 1,5). However, the transitions utilized a very interesting pattern of movement on the 7,8,1,2, and using the 3,4,5,6 as time to create tension which had me absolutely captivated. A lot of the “accent” counts occurred on the untraditional 2, and 8, which created an interesting disruption of cyclic movements. So yes, I was definitely fan-girling over the dancing the whole time, and it was mainly what brought the whole experience from the analytical to the emotive.

The whole performance of the concert got me super hyped that I felt I needed to keep dancing. Even though I couldn’t see the crowd above me, I felt such a connectedness in the audience as we were mesmerized by the Inti Raymi song. The full multisensory experience power of the Q-pop allowed me to feel such delightful freedom and I will treasure this night. I felt like the K-pop elements added favourably to the sharing of the Quechua culture. I just wish I could understand all the Quechua lyrics so I might look that up when I get a hold of LENIN’s CD.

A repetitive question we’ve encountered in this course has been: what is modern indigeneity? Does it exist in Peru? Our night of Q-pop showed elements of indigeneity like the Quechua language and clothing LENIN was wearing. Indigeneity is not this isolated culture that has been preserved without change like many pre-contact artifacts we’ve encountered in museums. In a time where there’s such an emphasis on the visual world, the concert demonstrated the sonic transmission of indigeneity between bodies across time. LENIN considers himself Quechua, but he is also a person with access to the internet and various cultures outside his own. His engagement with other cultures doesn’t make his indigeneity less real. Indigenous culture isn’t diluted by outside influence, and if anything I think strengthens the communication of culture. I think his art practice stands as symbolic of what it can mean to be indigenous amongst our modern world. LENIN is imagining the fusion of K-pop and Andean music and creating something in the physical world, demonstrating the definitions of modernity we discussed in class.