Our speaker, Anna Winestein (St Catherine's College, Oxford), is a cultural historian, arts entrepreneur, curator and artist, born in St. Petersburg, Russia and educated in Boston and Oxford. She holds separate undergraduate degrees in Art History and Painting, and graduate degrees in Economics and Modern History. At Oxford, she attended St Catherine's College and the Faculty of Modern History, writing her dissertation about institutions and social networks among Russian artists in Paris 1870-1917. She is the co-founder and Executive Director of Ballets Russes Arts Initiative, a Boston-based arts non-profit that seeks to connect the US with Eastern Europe through the visual and performing arts. BRAI has been carrying out programming in Massachusetts, the East Coast of the US, and internationally, including exhibitions, concerts, film screening series, dance and theater performances and more since 2009. She is also Director of Programs at Congregation Kehillath Israel in Brookline.

In her wide-ranging career, she has previously served as Creative Director of the Hermitage Museum Foundation, Cultural Envoy for the State Department, consultant to Sotheby's and the National Gallery of Art, as well as to private collectors, administrator for Oxford of a network of British and French scholars of Russia, and more. She has published numerous books, exhibition catalogues, essays and articles across varied topics in the art and performance history of the Russian and Soviet empires and their contacts with Europe and the US.

Outsplendouring Splendour in London: The Ballets Russes' Sleeping Princess production of 1921

Since its 1890 premiere, Marius Petipa and Pyotr Tchaikovsky's first ballet collaboration, The Sleeping Beauty, has become iconic, with various versions of it amongst the most performed ballets in the classical repertoire around the world. Its very first full presentation in the West actually took place in London in 1921-1922, performed by Sergei Diaghilev's Paris based Ballets Russes. Retitled for English audiences as The Sleeping Princess, it was the last major production designed by Leon Bakst, the quintessential Ballets Russes scenographer who contributed critically to the company's early success and enduring legacy. The ballet was both the grandest (described as ‘outsplendouring splendour’) and the most catastrophic (a ‘gorgeous calamity’ that plunged the company into crippling debt) in the long collaboration between Bakst and Diaghilev. Yet it remains to this day the longest running dance production in the history of the West End. This talk tells the story of a remarkable theatrical endeavor whose legacy continues to be re-evaluated to this day.