Get to know new humanities faculty at UB at the Humanities Institute’s brown-bag lunch sessions.

FREE and open to the public. Coffee and cookies provided.

Professional wrestling has a history that reaches back into the nineteenth century and spans the globe, with Mexico, Japan, and the US, in particular, exchanging wrestlers, performance styles, and verbal and physical vocabularies. Despite fulfilling many of the formal definitions of theatre—it’s scripted, live entertainment performed in front of an audience by actors portraying characters—professional wrestling is often overlooked as such. This talk examines the labor of professional wrestling to reveal the many connections to a range of commercial and globalizing theatre forms beyond an apparent theatricality.