WORKSHOPS
Painted Furniture WorkshopSaturday 26 & Sunday 27 April 10am – 5pm • Tickets £120 include refreshments, entry to the house and talk.
Charleston’s famous collection of painted furniture provides the inspiration for this two day course. Paint restoration and special effects expert, Sophie Coryndon, will instruct participants in how to prepare the surface of a chosen piece of furniture, before decorating it with their own design. The item could be a lamp base, frame, cupboard, box or other small piece. In addition, Dr.Wendy Hitchmough, Charleston’s curator, will give a talk on painted surfaces and furniture in the house.This course develops on last year’s event, although beginners are welcome. |
Charleston Festival Workshop
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| Virginia Woolf (née Stephen) by Barbara Strachey (Hultin) (later Halpern) bromide print, 1938 © National Portrait Gallery, London |
Led by Laura Marcus, Professor of English at Edinburgh, the workshop will look at the attitudes of Bloomsbury, and Virginia Woolf in particular to the new art of the film in the 1920s and 30s.
Focusing on Woolf's 1926 essay 'The Cinema' and Clive Bell's writings on experimental cinema it will explore how Woolf's work, from 'Kew Gardens' to the fiction of the late 1930s, took up the devices of the film medium.
It will also look at recent adaptations of Woolf's novels, including Mrs Dalloway and Orlando, and at the ways in which the film The Hours intertwines biography and fiction.
Charleston Festival Workshop - OrlandoThursday 22 May 10am-4pm • Tickets £50 include tea and coffee.
Orlando explores the extraordinary character of Vita Sackville-West; her family’s relationship with history; her quixotic sexuality and personality as a writer. Woolf set out, in her fantasy biography, to produce an ‘odder, deeper, more angular’ version of the story. In a one-day workshop we consider Orlando, not only as Virginia Woolf ’s tribute to her muse, but as an ingenious narrative experiment which, though written with enormous poetic license, nevertheless gets to the heart of her subject.The workshop is led by Dr. Sue Roe whose books include: Writing and Gender: Virginia Woolf ’s Writing Practice; and The Private Lives of the Impressionists. |
Charleston Festival Workshop – City Reads
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| Laura Thompson, ‘Agatha Christie: An English Mystery’ book cover 2007 – Headline Press |
The one day workshop led by Laura Thompson will concentrate on the art of biography: what particular difficulties - practical, literary, ethical - does the genre present? It will have special reference to Laura Thompson's latest book Agatha Christie: An English Mystery. This definitive portrait of a remarkable woman was written with unprecedented access to private papers and informed by interviews with Agatha's family; her grandson and, before they died, her daughter and son-in-law. Laura Thompson has also written a biography of Nancy Mitford.
The workshop is in conjunction with Brighton City Reads, a series of special events devoted to crime fiction. For more information visit www.cityreads.co.uk.