Discursive and Practical (Re)production of "Fandom" as a Community of Musical Lovers in Russia

In recent years, theatrical life in Russia has undergone significant changes due to social and economic transformations. The musical, although initially a "product of Western culture," has been developing in Russia for a long time as a popular national genre. Every year it attracts more and more people who call themselves "musical fans", while actively emphasizing the "theatrical" basis of their interest. Nevertheless, at the moment, there is practically no research in the sociological field on both the place of the musical genre in society as a whole and the community united on the basis of "interest to the genre". At the same time, it is not completely clear how, in the case of the theater, a discourse about "fandom" appears, and how it unites into a single community of musicals' fans. Using as a theoretical basis various theories of the formation and functioning of communities, as well as practices of involvement and interaction between their participants, the study examines the production of "fandom" as a community of musical lovers in Russia. This community is a center of communication for people who actively declare their love for the musical genre, on the basis of which they unite into a single community. Using qualitative methods of non-included observation and 10 in-depth semi-structured interviews, the work examines the main practices and discourses that exist today in the fandom of the Russian Musical Theater in order to determine how these practices and discourse contribute to the production of "fandom" as a community. The study showed that the participants of the RMT fandom form strong interpersonal bonds, in which one of the important practices is the "exchange" of information and opinions. They communicate regularly and create a close-knit community in which everyone contributes to the best of their abilities. At the same time, there is a fairly large pool of possible activities within the fandom, which also generates a variety of relationships between its participants, leading, among other things, to the active development of discourses within the fandom. The study suggests that the community in question contains many characteristics of various communities, but it comes closest to the concept of a "community of practice". At the same time, the practices themselves and a certain discourse around the identity of the RMT fan, the distribution of different roles between the participants, as well as their interaction, make it possible for the fandom to actively reproduce itself as a kind of community of practice.