How would you feel if a guy who had just body slammed the shit out of another decided to strike a conversation with you?

Good question, I thought. I wasn't sure.

"Generally speaking most of these guys are sweethearts," Shaun El C. Leonardo says about wrestlers. "They are some of the nicest men you've ever met in your life."

Admittedly, I had trouble believing how outward aggressive behavior and civilized pleasantries go hand-in-hand, a prejudice that Leonardo suspects is embedded in the cultural definition of manhood, one that he has investigated through performance art (he's also a sculptor and painter). His predisposition is to deconstruct hyper-masculine role models and icons in the American popular zeitgeist.

Starting from how he was taught to be a man, Leonardo delves in to debrief the tangents that prevent masculinity from being more inclusive, lucid and human according to 21st century societal norms and beyond.

Leonardo's athletic work is part of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston's Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art exhibition, a survey of the contributions of black performance artists from the 1960s to the present and over three generations, on view through Feb. 15.

It's customary for new music presenter Musiqa to partner with CAMH to organize informal recitals that connect artistic genres. A Loft Concert set for Saturday will premiere Leonardo's The Arena, an event that steps outside of so many conventions, away from the CAMH and into a boxing ring.

The Arena is a 30- to 45-minute piece — depending on the stamina of the performers — that fuses improvisatory percussion with Greco-Roman wrestling. It takes place at the Progressive Amateur Boxing Association in collaboration with Project Row Houses.

The suggested attire is "creative black tie."

Challenging Latin machismo

Leonardo grew up in Queens, N.Y., in a culturally diverse area in a Latin household rich with Dominican and Guatemalan roots. The unmovable, unbreakable, unshakeable machismo his family adopted created an emotional gap between Leonardo and the male figures in his family.

All the men had mustaches. He saw his father cry for the first time during college. Leonardo himself holds degrees from the San Francisco Art Institute and Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.

Early in his practice, Leonardo decided that to properly critique his subjects he had to do it from the inside out. As he became fascinated with hero figures, sports personalities and virile archetypes, he resolved to approach his study from an experiential point of view.

"I always immerse myself entirely in the world I set out to decipher," he explains. "When I was doing work in boxing, I was training as an amateur boxer. When I was working in wrestling, I was training in wrestling.

"When I took on my recent work in bull fighting, I traveled to Central Mexico and enlisted in a school to take bull fighting lessons."

Leonardo tests himself in some of the most tense environments. In Mexico, he trained at the Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre, which claims to be the oldest professional wrestling organization in the world, and promotes a number of televised events. In New York, he got in shape at Gleason's Gym in Brooklyn, a boxing institution responsible for producing such fighters as Mike Tyson, Muhammad Ali and Gerry Cooney.

"I am not posing as a boxer, fighter or wrestler," he says. "I am not trying to mimic them. I am trying to become them. It allows me to understand what it means to be held up to a heroic status, such that I can figure out what the belief systems are around this particular masculine ideal."

Many wrestling fans recognize Leonardo as "El Conquistador," the capped, masked pugilist who advanced far into this part performance, part sports, part entertainment realm. Even though he knows he has to keep a safe distance so he can parse what's happening with the keen eye of an artist and the methodical brain of a thinker.

It's tempting for Leonardo to become a part of the brotherhood of sportsmanship and lose sight of the aesthetic and analytical part of his work.

What he's been able to discern is the innate nature of the way men interact before a match, during competition and in the locker room.

"In these type of sports, there's something in these men that triggers both the aggression and the hero complex and propels them to prove themselves on the main stage," Leonardo says. "To gain a sense of belonging, we test each other with violence and aggression — and this becomes the manly ritual that permits us to bond.

"The only way we are permitted to embrace one another is to beat the shit out of each other first."

The music adds value in two ways, according to Musiqa's artistic director and co-founder Anthony K. Brandt.

"The percussionists job is to offer something that will breathe a sense of what's a part of the culture of this activity," he explains. "The second role is to twist that out of shape. The music will set the atmosphere as if the event is very conventional, and then destabilize the environment and open it up to possibilities through improvisation."

That means the music will not mimic what's happening in the ring. Rather, it's a conversation that proffers meaningful commentary alongside the work, whatever that happens to be at that moment in time. Though there have been rehearsals, percussionists Craig Hauschildt, Alec Warren and Blake Wilkins are prepared to go with the flow.

The Arena is Leonardo's first piece with live music. As he reaches beyond his own comfort zone within his style of performance art, The Arena also follows a desire to produce event spectacles whose environment is as important as the action.

"Just make sure to cheer for the right guy," he laughs.

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Musiqa presents Radical Presence on Saturday at 2 p.m. and at 4 p.m. at the Progressive Amateur Boxing Association at 3212 Dowling St. Admission is free. Attire is creative black tie.