![]() ![]() "He thinks of himself as a true stage performer, but also as a true athlete," says Erdman. ("Selling" is the wrestling term for making another wrestler's move look like it's hurting you.) ![]() He points to how Omega draws on his athletic background - he was a junior hockey goaltender prior to discovering wrestling - to do things like sell his opponents' offence and portray injury. He adds that even in a big, physical genre like pro wrestling, he appreciates how Omega brings nuance and detail to his performances. ![]() And having seen him put a match together, in real time backstage, he thinks about them basically like a 30-minute television show." "He's always cognizant of what the story is that he's trying to tell. "I think what makes Kenny special in the ring is the connection," says Erdman. He says that what drew him to Omega wasn't just his ability to perform amazing, off-the-top rope athletic manoeuvres, or his ability to have long, endurance-testing marathon matches - it was the way he thought about story. He was also part of the team that made a 2019 TSN documentary about Omega entitled Omega Man: A Wrestling Love Story. "That he was doing something more complex and more athletic than I had seen before."Įrdman is a veteran combat sports journalist and lifelong wrestling fan. "I felt when I was watching Kenny that I was watching someone at the peak of this art form," says Corey Erdman. Kenny Omega fights Jungle Boy at AEW Saturday Night Dynamite in Jacksonville, Fla in June 2021. In fact, one could argue that if wrestling is an art, that makes Kenny Omega one of Canada's most celebrated and prolific performing artists. If you accept pro wrestling as an art form - which, according to Eero Laine, you have to for it to make any sense - then Kenny Omega is one of its great performers. Sports historian - and, effectively, wrestling critic - Dave Meltzer has actually had to re-adjust his ranking system to accurately reflect the sort of work Omega was doing, giving Omega's 2018 match against Kazuchika Okada an unprecedented seven stars on what is ordinarily a five-star scale. He's been in their top 10 for four of the last five years. It was his second time winning that honour (the first was in 2018). The Winnipeg-born performer was recently ranked the number one male wrestler in the world in 2021 by Pro Wrestling Illustrated, the people responsible for ranking such things. In fact, Kenny Omega is arguably THE professional wrestler of our age. ![]() For another, he's a really, really good wrestler. For one thing, he's also a wrestling promoter, working as an executive vice president of All-Elite Wrestling (AEW), a well-funded upstart promotion that is challenging the WWE's stranglehold on televised wrestling in North America. The 38 year-old Omega, whose real name is Tyson Smith, is a professional wrestler. "But in a lot of cases, it can be like performance art, or a night out at the theatre… I think that one of the beautiful things about professional wrestling is, depending on where you are and the audience you're performing for, it can be either/or." "I like to compare what I do to episodic television," says Omega. This flexibility is what Kenny Omega loves about professional wrestling. Sometimes it becomes experimental and verges into performance art. Although its business model is musical theatre, it's descended from carnival sideshows, and it regularly gets compared to soap operas. That said, Laine says wrestling defies neat categorizations. "If you look back at the early WWE, when they were forming their public company, they described their business model as theatrical. "Instead of, in musical theatre, breaking into song, wrestlers break into fights," he says. He says that if you were going to compare pro wrestling to another art form, its closest cousin is probably musical theatre. He studies popular entertainment, with a particular emphasis on pro wrestling. Laine is an assistant professor of Theatre and Dance at the University at Buffalo. (Blading is the practice of wrestler's hiding a small piece of razor in their wrist tape, and then cutting their forehead - where a small, superficial wound can create a lot of blood - for dramatic effect.) "When Marina Abramović cuts herself with a knife, it's the same way as a wrestler blades," he says. For one thing, its scripted nature means that, while it's athletic, it's not technically a sport for another, if it's not art, then it's just "madness." Pro wrestling is definitely an art form, says Eero Laine. ![]()
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