Tom K Kemp’s film Crisis Acres (2025) is a playful reflection on the pressures facing the British national healthcare system. The film observes the testing of a "serious game" that simulates the daily running of an imaginary NHS hospital, and the experiences of 35 surgeons, clinicians, nurses, administrators, politicians and chronic patients who participate. Blending role-play with real experience, the players find themselves caught between ludic abstraction, bureaucracy and life-or-death decision making.

The screening is organized in the framework of If I Can’t Dance’s ongoing programming around healthcare, access and medical histories, a line of research that aims to bring to light the many historical strands of our space: the Collegezaal of the former Women’s Clinic of the Wilhelmina Gasthuis hospital.

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The screening will be followed by an aftertalk with Kemp and Amsterdam-based artist Pernilla Manjula Philip, whose work explores chronic illness as both a lived reality and a field of research. Drawing on her own experience, she examines do-it-yourself/together and open-source medical tools, focusing on how people invent, experiment, and care for themselves and each other when healthcare systems fail. and what this reveals about power in medicine. 

ACCESS NOTES:

• If I Can't Dance is located on the second floor of a historic building and, unfortunately, is not accessible by elevator. The venue is a former medical theatre dating from the 1920s and retains its original seating. Access across the tiered seating (tribunes) is via two narrow staircases.

• Two gender-neutral toilets are located on the first floor.

•  The film is 60 min long and is in English with English subtitles. The conversation is in spoken English.