What Is Single Leg?

Oh, it’s the live art show I’ve been developing for the last couple of years, about the nature of athletic competition and freestyle wrestling in particular, which includes live for-real wrestling as a fundamental component of the show.

Yes this is the thing I went to Belgrade for that I was so coy about at the time, and I’ve had a couple of developments on the down-low since then. Wrestling is such a key aspect of my life and creating a show that will exist partly to present the world of the sport to a lay audience is a nerve-wracking process. That said, off the back of a week-long development in Sydney involving several members of the incredible Sydney Silverbacks, a bunch of folk in the arts community are now aware of the project and I now have a producer on board. Plus our first public development is confirmed to take place at Crack Theatre festival in October. So really it’s time for me to start talking about it here.

The show is about what might drive a human to strive at a thing that they are never going to be the best at, or maybe even good at, and about the strange nature of competition as a way to negotiate worth. It’s about the strange intersections between niche communities and it’s about obsession. In form terms, we’ll be creating a performance model that different wrestlers in different touring locations can be plugged into, so that the nature of the show will be re-shaped each time by the specific participants. At least, that’s the aim.

The development showings have gone well but I’ve never felt such a sense of responsibility toward a project being all that it can be. So my future updates about the creation of the show might well involve some dark nights of the soul. That said, I am very excited for the outside enthusiasm the show has already garnered, and like everything I do it’s at least bound to get weirder from here.