Action Hero

Formed in 2005, Action Hero make intimate and accessible live art and performance which features a deliberately low-tech, do-it-yourself aesthetic. Often working in unconventional spaces, the company create celebratory events that rely on an engagement with their surroundings and seek to involve audiences as collaborators and co-conspirators; drawing spectators together both as a unified part of the live action and as a temporary community.

Following the huge success of their first production A Western in 2009, the company returns to Edinburgh Showcase with Watch Me Fall in a quest to ‘push the limit in the name of entertainment’. Staging increasingly questionable re-enactments of daredevil feats on a homemade runway surrounded by a standing audience, the performers celebrate and ridicule the human race’s obsession to go higher, further and faster. Paying homage to flamboyant stuntman Evel Knievel and famous test pilot Chuck Yeager – and using their words and the inspirational speeches of various American presidents as source material – this new work explores man’s appetite to attempt the impossible and the inevitability of our spectacular and sometimes inglorious failure.