UCA Professor to speak at Tate Modern
University for the Creative Arts (UCA) Professor Ulrich Lehmann will be introducing a famous documentary depicting the First Workers' Olympic Games in 1925 before its first UK airing at the Tate Modern this July.
The film by Wilhelm Prager, The New Great Power: The First Workers' Olympics 1925, is an early masterpiece of social cinema. Combining modernism and realism in a dramatic narrative of the games, it sent a strong message of empowerment and engagement to the international workers' movement.
Ulrich Lehmann is a Professor of Fashion at UCA Rochester and works across two areas of research; European Cultural History of the 'Long Nineteenth Century' and Modern Fashion History & Theory (1860 - today). Professor Lehmann is also the Course Leader for the MA Fashion course delivered at UCA Rochester.
In his introduction to the film, Professor Lehmann will provide a brief history of the Workers' Olympiads and their role in shaping an alternative understanding of sport, away from the commercialism and private entrepreneurship of the traditional Olympic Games.
At a time when London celebrates the 2012 Olympics, the film is a powerful reminder of a time and of a movement that still championed the Games' independence and its ideal to educate and liberate the people. It highlights an alternative view of sport and physical education that eschews nationalism and commercialism in favour of international cooperation and solidarity between people.
This event will further UCA's already strong involvement in the London 2012 Olympic Games, sitting alongside the Podium Award for best Cultural Initiative for the Creative Campus Project as well as the day of Olympic activities at UCA Rochester to coincide with the Olympic Torch's journey past the campus by one of UCA's students.
To book a place at the screening, visit the Tate Modern website.
For more information contact:
David Reilly, Press Officer, UCA
T: 01252 892939
E: dreilly@ucreative.ac.uk
