How Mid Wales Opera brings fully staged productions to communities across Wales and the Borders, alongside school and community projects that deepen engagement and build future audiences. Demystifying opera, and showing how its powerful stories and music create meaningful, uplifting experiences for people of all ages and backgrounds.

 Bridget Wallbank has worked in Wales in many aspects of theatre for nearly forty years. She was involved in Mid Wales Opera’s very first production of The Magic Flute and her work life has been intertwined with Mid Wales Opera’s history ever since. She has also worked with professional and amateur companies and festivals across the UK, including the Britten-Pears School Aldeburgh, West Green House Opera, Cwmni Theatr Maldwyn and Opra Cymru, The Hay Festival, Hinterland Kells and Jewish Book Week. There is nothing she loves more than being in a theatre with a problem to solve and facitating the creative team in their vision and she will talk about what goes into putting on an opera.

 Wireless sensor networks: in the forests of mid Wales and the Mekong Delta

 Radio communication technology has revolutionized the collection of environmental data. The days of trekking through the mud to collect memory cards from data logging instruments in forests and river deltas are thankfully behind us. This talk will describe how custom-designed, low-power, long-range data networks can be constructed to enable reliable environmental monitoring even in areas with very poor mobile phone signal, and discuss how such networks have enabled research in flood mitigation in rural Wales and will soon be applied to assisting Vietnamese rice farmers in the Mekong delta.

 Iestyn Pierce is a professor in electronic engineering at the school of Computer Science and Engineering, Bangor University and his research has focused on the numerical modelling of engineering systems. He chairs the Engineering Centre for North and Mid Wales, a voluntary organisation which provides experiences of the engineering profession to hundreds of school pupils across the region every year and also o-chair of the Science subject panel of the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol (the Welsh national college for Welsh medium education), having previously chaired the coleg's Physical Sciences panel.

Paul Panton junior, son of well-known barrister and antiquarian, who inherited his father’s collection of Welsh manuscripts.

 Jenet is a long-time member of Bangor U3A and very interested in stories about people of the past, who they were and the houses they lived in. She says she has no relevant qualifications except a French degree which helped when she was looking into her own family who were smugglers in Brittany. 

 Wounded soldiers were first treated at the front in casualty clearing stations and hospitals. Those whose injuries were not life threatening were shipped to a convalescent hospital in the UK for a period of recuperation and treatment before going home. These hospitals were staffed by Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses. The talk will focus on their work in nursing convalescing soldiers.

 After over thirty years in professional development, Tesni now writes well-researched historical fiction set in Cymru and in the trenches during WW1.

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 Details online under ‘Groups’

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Carlos has worked as a postdoctoral scientist in the laboratories of Professor Doug Winton (Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute) and Professor Charles Swanton (The Francis Crick Institute, London), and at the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute where he started developing new models of lung cancer using healthy human lung cells. He was appointed lecturer at the North Wales Medical School (Bangor University) in September 2025, and is one of the academics of the North West Cancer Research Institute, a centre affiliated to the North Wales Medical School that aims to reinvigorate the cancer research activity in North Wales.   

Mad Tales from the Raj. Europeans and Mental Illness in Nineteenth-Century South Asia. 

Christmas Activity- Details to follow