Round 2, the second lucha that I’ve been to in the last month. This time, the capstone to almost 48 hours of back-to-back shooting. Hard to believe that that morning I woke up under an open sky, way up in the mountains inside a sleeping bag that was just a little too light for the late summer nights. Curled up, I was cold for the first part of the darkness, caught in that semi-sleep that you get when your body is not quite comfortable enough to fall off into a deep sleep. I stayed that way until a lucid vision stole away the frigid air. Someone walked in out of the darkness, quietly covering me in a blanket. I could feel the weight of the heavy fabric wrap me tight against the ground. Wool. Thick and heavy with the smell of my grandmother’s basement, the way that linens feel after decades of sitting neatly folded in a chest or on a closet shelf. And then there was a warmth that started in my lungs, spreading out through my limbs, steam moving through pipes. The night was no longer cold and the dream gave way to sleep until the purple hues of morning and the chill of the dew that had settled on my face woke me to a new day.
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Kayfabe is the unsaid rule that luchadores should stay in character both inside the ring and out. In the context of theater, it encourages the suspension of disbelief but also goes a step further by carrying the story off the stage and into the lives of the spectators. Kayfabe is to make Peter Pan real, giving life to the notion that things can be imagined into existence. It reminds us that those things we dream are not that far out of reach and refreshes our faith in the collective fairy tale where good triumphs over evil and struggle is always rewarded.
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Went to a lucha libre match this past weekend. A few days prior to going, a friend of mine introduced me to filmmakers Kim Shively and Chris Bagely, two people whose work I have been following over the last couple of years. The trailers for Wesley Willis’s Joyrides, their recently released full-length documentary on the late, great rock ‘n roller, started popping up on the internet last year coinciding with the film’s tour through the festival circuit. The duo’s DIY approach to filmmaking and niche interest in the strange, beautiful, and raw subculture is something that I have always found inspiring.
Their latest project focuses on lucha libre and looks to be a promising follow-up to the Willis work. So when they offered tickets to join them at a lucha match they were filming over the weekend, I couldn’t say no. And I couldn’t put my camera down, either.
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