Football fan choreographies as multimodal performances

This article examines football fan choreographies as multimodal performances. Fan choreographies, which are regularly organized by supporter groups at football stadia around the world, combine collective embodied actions with diverse media such as banners and flags. Choreographies serve multiple communicative purposes ranging from celebrating a team to commemorating events or protesting against unwanted developments. The article proposes a novel approach to analysing fan choreographies, building on previous research on linguistic, communicative and semiotic aspects of football, which are combined with recent theories of multimodal semiotics. By employing a methodology that uses the notion of materiality as a foundation for multimodal analysis, the article demonstrates how choreographies integrate various media that differ in their potential for meaning-making into complex spatiotemporal organizations. The results, which underline the nature of choreographies as collective social actions that are strongly anchored in football culture and embedded within society at large, illustrate how applying theories of multimodality can provide an improved understanding of performances more generally.