Starting from the story of Bruno Sammartino (Pizzoferrato, 1935 – Pittsburgh, 2018), Antonio Perticara investigates the turning point Sammartino brought to American professional wrestling and traces the origins of today’s confusion between spectacle and reality within the infotainment industry. Through the use of misdirection strategies and magic tricks, the performance draws an invisible line connecting the American dream of a young wrestler who emigrated to the United States after the Second World War and the spectacle of professional wrestling as a testing ground for the emergence of the political and media phenomenon Donald Trump. A recent conspiracy theory linking the alleged death of Elvis Presley to the current President of the United States punctuates the narrative, redirecting attention to a great rock ’n’ roll refrain: One for the money, two for the show.
Rehearsal at the Angewandte Performace Laboratory, Vienna, 2026
Wrestling World magazine, p.34, 1964