Award-winning Bristol-based duo Gemma Paintin and James Stenhouse have been creating interdisciplinary performance together for the past decade; touring to more than twenty countries across five continents. With the live experience at the heart of everything they do, their work takes many different forms and explores the iconography of popular culture and its use, both as a weapon and as a shared cultural memory. A book of six of their works, including 'Slap Talk', has been published by Oberon.

'Slap Talk' is a durational work that’s funny and entertaining but also dark, complex and deeply unsettling. For six uninterrupted hours, Action Hero read from autocues whilst audiences - who can come and go as they please - simultaneously watch the live performance and a video feed from a camera to a monitor. Over time the gestures, codes, images and rhetoric of popular culture (and by extension everyday life) are playfully re-rendered, reversed and repeated until the foundations of violence inherent in the clichéd languages and texts of contemporary culture are thoroughly exhausted.

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