Afterall / The Showroom Seminar

The Showroom
63 Penfold Street
London NW8 8PQ

£5 entrance fee

In this seminar, Emily Wardill will discuss her new feature-length film, Game Keepers Without Game (2009) in conversation with the poet J.H. Prynne.

Game Keepers Without Game is based on the seventeenth-century play Life is a Dream (La Vida es Suena) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. The film takes Calderón’s story of an imprisoned prince and translates it into the context of contemporary London. The original’s themes of morality, incarceration and truth resurface in Wardill’s present-day narrative of a violent child, put up for adoption at an early age, who re-enters the family home as a teenager and a stranger.

J.H. Prynne studied at Cambridge and has taught there for some time. He has published twenty-nine collections of poems from 1968-2009, all but two reprinted in his Poems (2005), with another collection currently in press. Also there are a few extended commentary-essays: on the Han Chinese lyric, on a painting by Willem de Kooning, on a sonnet by Shakespeare and on a short poem by Wordsworth, and a lecture on ‘Huts’. Recently he has been travelling in Nepal. Some fuller information can be found on websites.

Read a Guardian profile of J.H. Prynne here.

Emily Wardill is a London-based film-maker. She has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, including solo projects at Spacex, Exeter (2009); ICA, London (2008); Fortescue Avenue/Jonathan Viner, London (2005 and 2006); and STANDARD (OSLO) (2008). Her work has been screened at the Art Now Lightbox, Tate Britain; the International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Witte de With, Rotterdam; and the London Film Festival. In 2008, Wardill was nominated for the Jarman Award and performed Life is a Dreamat the Serpentine Gallery, London in 2007.

Read an interview between Wardill and curator Mike Sperlinger from Afterall’s ‘Artists at Work’ series here.

Please email info@theshowroom.org to reserve a place and to be sent the advance reading material selected by Wardill and Prynne.