Wrestling IS Performance Art: Deal With It

You can watch Jon Moxley chew guys’ faces off in punishing, brutal matches. You can watch Charlotte Flair straight up beat the piss out of her opponents in some of the most physical WWE matches ever held. You can watch Zack Sabre, Jr.—who rarely bumps, much less on his head and neck—manipulate limbs into positions of certain agony. You can watch Daniel Bryan scrape the faces off his opponents in matches that intersect the dual remit of safety and credibility.

You can watch Kenny Omega pull off a V-Trigger and worry, momentarily, that he just inflicted brain damage on his opponents. You can watch Hiroshi Tanahashi work matches so intricate and believable that, every time, his dragon screw makes you believe that he might just win—win a match, not continue to enter a genius “performance”. It obviously is a performance, but it never feels like that in the moment.

And, yes, you can also watch Orange Cassidy pull off one of the best suicide dives in the game, with his hands in his pockets, and perceive it as either an affront to or a new, flexing mode of psychology.

You can watch all of this without it compromising itself.

The counterargument isn’t without merit—a guy like Arn, who was awesome for his time, didn’t mangle his back so that some chancer can expose his painstaking work as a wry sham—but transgression is good. Transgression is vital. The best art is made in defiance of something. And if you hate that art, and hate the very designation of “art”, wrestling is so good elsewhere that this sub-industry doesn’t dilute the serious business.

If wrestling ain’t flips and goofy gimmicks—if it’s a tough-looking good guy beating up a weasel of a heel—then Kota Ibushi and Jay White recaptured and perfected that ideal in their blistering, all-time great NJPW G1 Climax final this very month.

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