Wrestling with Nashville
Nashville, Tennessee is on the verge of a reinvention, like a lot of cities these days, drawing deeply upon its own local tradition and ingenuity of its residents, to create things all over again. It’s a fantastic time to visit this city, because the reinventions are much more innovative than most, bringing to life some of the most captivating ideas, and certainly not afraid to appear low-brow. This willingness to cross forms and barriers has served the music scene very well, and some of the best new performance work might be variations on an old theme: professional wrestling.
It would be ironic perhaps but also very fitting if this sport could start bringing more visitors from around the country and the world, spending time at Nashville luxury hotels and enjoying all the other things the town has to offer. There’s a lot of feast to choose from, but the United States Wrestling Organization is offering some of the best spectacle. This isn’t the new wave of wrestling, where the performers acted a bit like athletes, and seemed to take themselves as seriously. It’s true that there is some of those macho boasts and taunts, but there is also a particularly fantastic kind of tongue-in-cheekness here about the whole thing.
The father-son circuit angel is just one clue as to what’s seeming to be happening here. In a room that doesn’t fit more than 200 people, this isn’t meant to be the large-scale spectacle that other wrestling fosters. Looking at Tony Falk, one of the regulars here, there is suddenly an idea that this might actually be a return to the very first wave in the US. That was the era where wrestlers would adopt super-hero like alter egos, based in a kind of vaudevillian sense of humor that verged on the absurd, and sometimes grotesque. Earlier photos of Falk in his days where he was quoting Boy George in his dress, something else comes to the surface, and this sport starts to fall into the realm of art.
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