Theatre of Wrestling: Unruly Music Hall Sport Documentary

Longterm collaborators Wrestling Resurgence are running a new series of short films, ‘Theatre of Wrestling’, in which innovative combat-artists explore and challenge notions of showmanship, stage fighting, and theatrical violence. In this post we share their documentary, and in the next post we interview two of the people behind it, Richard Summers-Calvert and Sam West.

Set in an empty theatre, Leicester’s oldest, the project draws on the transgressive histories of British popular theatre, including the Victorian music hall, variety theatre, the Shakespearean stage, and fairgrounds and circuses. In a far cry from the polite theatre that dominates today, Music Halls were bold and scandalous spaces where feats of strength and exhibitions of wrestling were interwoven with comedy, popular songs, and other variety acts such as human statuary and animal performances. This innovative new project reconnects this “unruly” theatre of the past with today’s forms of combat performance, specifically independent professional wrestling, which has experienced a contemporary resurgence. Created through a collaborative process that brought together, performance artists, scholars, choreographers, magicians, and wrestlers from a diverse range of backgrounds, the film centres around three ground-breaking to-camera-performances. Against the backdrop of Covid-19 and the ongoing restrictions effecting the performing arts, each performance was filmed live to an absent audience. Accompanying the finished performances, is this short-documentary featuring additional materials such as archive footage, “behind-the-scenes” content and commentary from the various artists who made the project possible.

You can see an interview with the documentary makers in our next film, and be sure to check out our other wrestling films with Claire Warden and Sam West at Wrestling Resurgence, and the wrestlers Nick Radford, Chuck Mambo, RJ City, The OJMO and Josef Kafka.