It’s been 15 years since we first performed together under the name Action Hero. Time flies when you’re having fun! To celebrate, we’re launching You Had To Be There: 15 Years of Action Hero, a series of online ‘director’s commentaries’ where we share unseen footage and photos from our archives & talk about the process of making and performing the works. Each week we’ll focus on a different piece of work, starting next week with A Western. So if you’re an Action Hero fan, geek and or scholar, put these dates in your calendar:
Thurs 26 Nov: A Western
Thurs 3 Dec: Watch Me Fall
Thurs 10 Dec: Frontman
Thurs 17 Dec: Hoke’s Bluff
Thurs 7 Jan: Slap Talk
Thurs 14 Jan: Extraordinary Rendition
Thurs 21 Jan: Natural Selection
Thurs 28 Jan: Wrecking Ball
Thurs 4 Feb: Oh Europa
Thurs 11 Feb: Bits & Pieces- Other works
Each week, the commentary will go up our website at 8pm and will stay online for a week, so you can watch it live or save it for another day.
Much of our work has never been seen outside of its live context – you really did have to be there – and we’ve got lots of documentation that’s never seen the light of day (because its incomplete, or very rough, or because we didn’t want to share the work in a medium it wasn’t created for). But now we’ve reached this milestone of 15 years of practice together, it feels like the right time to show you some of it. So, we’ve trawled through our whole archive, and each week we’ll talk you through one of our pieces of work and try to give a sense of what it was like to be there, as well as how we made the piece. It’ll be a stumble down memory lane, starting back in 2005 and ending right about now.
Whether you’re new to our work or were there right at the beginning (in your cowboy hat) please do join us online at actionhero.org.uk each Thursday from the 26th November. It’ll be great to celebrate with you.
Gemma and James
Action Hero