This day of lectures tells the story of the remarkable dancers, choreographers, artists and composers who made up the legendary Ballets Russes company established by Sergei Diaghilev in Paris in 1909.  Building on the achievements of Tchaikovsky, Petipa and the art patron Savva Mamontov, Diaghilev and his associates transformed the staid world of classical dance, changing it forever and exerting a lasting impact on all the arts.

After tracing a brief history of the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg, and Diaghilev's path from critic to impresario in the first lecture, the next two lectures will discuss how he singled out dancers of the calibre of Pavlova, Karsavina and Nijinsky to work with choreographers such as Fokine, Nijinska and Balanchine, artists such as Bakst, Picasso and Matisse, and composers such as Stravinsky, Ravel and Prokofiev, to create ballet stagings of genius.

This will be held at The Wokingham Theatre with the following format:

10.00    - Arrival and coffee

10.30   - Born in St Petersburg: How Diaghilev Brought Ballet to Paris in 1909

11.30    - Coffee

12.00   - From The Firebird to The Rite of Spring: The Ballets Russes 1910-1917

13.00   - Sandwich Lunch

14.00   - Dance and the Avant-Garde: The Ballets Russes 1917-1929

15.00   - Close 

Rosamund Bartlett is a writer, lecturer and translator whose work ranges across the arts, and across the cultures of Eastern and Northern Europe. She completed her doctorate at Oxford, has held several fellowships, recently becoming a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Brasenose College Oxford.

The author of several books, including biographies of Chekhov and Tolstoy, she has also translated acclaimed editions of Anna Karenina and Chekhov's stories and written on music and literature for various institutions and magazines. She is currently writing a book about the revolution in the arts which took place in early 20th-century Russia and its connection to modernist developments in Europe.

She has also led art, architecture, design and music tours throughout Europe, and contributes regularly to Proms events and opera broadcasts on the BBC. Her lecturing work has taken her from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford where she lives, to the V&A in London, and to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.  

 Cost: £40 to include tea/coffee and a sandwich lunch

Booking will open at 8am on 21st October

Click here to access the online booking form

Painter, printmaker, musician and Royal Academy founder member Thomas Gainsborough was born in May 1727.  As part of the celebrations for his tercentenary which includes upcoming exhibition at Tate Britain, this trio of lectures takes three sideways looks Gainsborough’s life and work to discover the best of this great British artist. 

The day begins with the story of his life and career through the fabrics and fashions that inspired him, from his childhood three hundred years ago in a Suffolk cloth merchant’s family, to the loose, almost impressionistic late style that captured the cloud-like muslins and powdered curls of the 1780s so perfectly.

Gainsborough made several portraits of his beloved daughters dressed in the latest styles, but underneath the surface of their graceful portraits is a story of poor health, social ambiguity and personal sorrow, the subject of the second lecture.

Finally, we meet some of the animals that gave Gainsborough so much pleasure, both as companions and as subjects for his art.

This will be held at The Wokingham Theatre with the following format:

10.00    - Arrival and coffee

10.30   - Gainsborough A la Mode

11.30    - Coffee

12.00   - Molly and the Captain

13.00   - Sandwich Lunch

14.00   - Nature Sits to Mr Gainsborough

15.00   - Close

Amina Wright has three decades of experience as a curator of historic art collections and exhibitions. She has produced several major exhibitions on eighteenth-century British Art and Old Masters and published and lectured widely in these areas.  As Senior Curator at the Holburne Museum in Bath she was a leading member of the team that delivered the museum’s highly successful 2011 redevelopment. She has recently completed a unique and brand new museum, the Auckland Project’s Faith Museum in County Durham.  Amina has also worked for English Heritage and the National Trust and has an MA in Christianity & the Arts from King’s College London. Her writing has been published in the Burlington Magazine, The Guardian, British Museum Magazine and the Arts Society Magazine and she has appeared on BBC Radio 4's Moving Pictures, Songs of Praise and Free Thinking on Radio 3.

 Cost: £40 to include tea/coffee and a sandwich lunch.

Thomas Gainsborough: The Gravenor Family, c. 1754. Oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection