Spectacular Choreographies of Epic Proportions: Ricki Starr, the Ballet Dancing Wrestler

Abstract

This essay traces my journey as a dance artist, scholar, and teacher, and elucidates the strategies with which I have learned to articulate my creative voice, to locate myself within the field of dance, and to perform my identity with self-determined agency. Using the first person and locating myself within this text is a strategy that I have drawn from feminist methodology, a meditation on voice, and a mode of autobiographical performance. This essay also examines the life, career and choreography of Ricki Starr, a ballet-dancing wrestler. Starr became a symbolic icon for me, and his use of ballet vocabulary offered me a powerful example of how to disrupt and challenge the norms of cultural hegemony. Starr’s work in the wrestling ring (and on television, in film and in the music industry), is a powerful case study that conveys some of the ways that dance allows for complex and challenging portrayals of gender identity as enacted through physical storytelling.