Project Objective

This project investigates the hypothesis that professional wrestling operates as a highly accessible and potent model of postmodern metatheatre and performance art, not merely lowbrow spectacle. Utilizing the unique perspective of the contemporary artist and curator (Clayton Windatt) and active professional wrestler (Rusty Blackwell the backwoods butcher), this study demonstrates how wrestling’s paradoxical contract, kayfabe (maintaining a fictional reality), systematically cultivates critical arts literacy in its audience. A key goal is deepening the understanding of artist-audience connectivity and call-response dynamics within live performance.

Areas of Investigation

The investigation is structured around four interconnected areas that translate complex theory into the lived experience of performer and spectator.

Phase I: The Kayfabe Contract and Performative Labour

This phase defines kayfabe as the core dramatic contract shaping narrative and audience expectation. From a performance artist’s perspective, it analyzes the performer’s intense physical and intellectual labour, defining the “Body as Text” through the acts of “selling” (communicating impact) and “ring psychology” (non-verbal storytelling). This establishes wrestling as a high-stakes performance art form based on an unwritten contract of trust between the body and the spectator.

Phase II: The Postmodern Vocabulary of the Ring

This phase maps wrestling’s self-referential narratives onto postmodern theory and contemporary curatorial practice. The “worked shoot”—a segment blurring reality and fiction—is positioned as a masterclass in pastiche and a direct critique of authenticity, mirroring institutional art critique. The genre’s use of exaggerated spectacle and hyper-reality offers a populist entry point into deconstruction.

Phase III: The Audience as Active Dramaturg and Co-Author

Focusing on the collective, this phase argues that the audience’s visceral participation (the “pop,” chanting, and active refusal to engage) is a quantifiable form of productive labor. This transforms the audience into an Active Dramaturg who co-authors and edits the narrative text in real-time. Critically, this process deepens the artist-audience connectivity through essential call-and-response dynamics, forcing the performer to constantly adapt to the crowd’s live critical judgment.

Phase IV: Critical Arts Literacy and Transferable Skills

This concluding phase synthesizes the findings. The fan’s required practice of dual awareness (simultaneously decoding the choreographed “work” while emotionally investing in the fictional “shoot”) is an advanced media skill. This imbues them with critical arts literacy: fluency in layered performance texts and a crucial intellectual comfort with ambiguity and cognitive dissonance, skills highly valued in contemporary art critique and exhibition design.

Anticipated Conclusion

The research is expected to demonstrate that professional wrestling inadvertently functions as a robust, populist training ground for critical theorists, generating a critically astute cohort capable of engaging with the complex demands of contemporary performance art and media.