'Body Slams, Curated: Pro Wrestling Enters Its Museum Era' by Melena Ryzik
2025
Raid entered stomping. But it wasn’t until Laveau Contraire pulled off one of his tentacles that he flipped (literally). Because in a wrestling match between an anthropomorphic giant bug and an influencer-spoofing drag queen, anything goes. With gold sequins glinting and fringe swishing on her thong leotard, Contraire beat Raid with his own body part — and then turned it on the referee. Raid — a bulging-eyed, scraggly-toothed creature in a singlet, driven to enact revenge for makeup testing and other critter-disrespecting ills — retaliated by slamming her into the ropes. Before long on one recent Tuesday, they were pummeling each other in a 16 x 16 foot ring set up at Pioneer Works, the art space in Brooklyn, as a crowd of 500 cheered. This is the over-the-top vision of Choke Hole, the queer and drag artist troupe that originated in New Orleans, whose multimedia, high-camp métier is a sharp satire of American culture expressed through W.W.E.-style wrestling. Read more