Action Hero
A Western
Action Hero try to re-enact remembered scenes from an imaginary western. as we attempt to recreate the majesty of the wild west we are let down by the rawness of the live; forced to re-imagine the space around us to fulfil our expectations, our western inevitably fails to live up to the epic grandeur of the real thing. In that failure, however, we inadvertently reveal the beauty in the fakery. Together we reclaim this chaotic, half-arsed western as our own and celebrate the failure of generic heroes, cheap whores and the all-American idol.
Action Hero is the collaboration between Bristol-based artists Gemma Paintin and James Stenhouse. We make work that uses audiences as our collaborators and co-conspirators. We are interested in performance that links audiences together and unifies them as part of the live event, building a temporary community. We make work that rewrites landscapes and encourages audiences to reconsider the spaces around them. We respond to site and context, and play with notions of real and imagined places within those sites. Our performance is defined by necessity: limited resources have created an aesthetic of roughness and intimacy that has become central to our work. A Western was developed with funding from Arts Council England. Action Hero are Arnolfini associate artists.