This weekend sees the third annual storytelling festival where once again great yarns, puppets and tales of yore take centre stage in Aberystwyth.
This year the festival will be exploring the roots and branches of folk tales in Wales and seeing how they interweave with the landscape, the people, the songs and the storytellers.
Third annual Aberystwyth Storytelling Festival
She will interweave it with references to the hurricane of 1987, her own family stories, the poems of Robert Graves and an archaeological dig on a beach.
The event will feature Ceri Rhys Matthews on flute, clarinet, pipes and other sounds.
On Saturday, 7 December, the internationally renowned performers Xanthe Gresham and Nick Hennessey will explore medieval misogyny in the form of the Arthurian sorceress Morgana Le Fey.
Le Fey has traditionally been cast as the destructive antithesis to King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.
The pair hope to fill the spaces between the many myths that abound about her through the use of music, games and stories.
Also on Saturday there will be a screening of The Adventures of Prince Achmed, which is the oldest surviving full-length animated film.
Made in 1926 by Lotte Reiniger, the animation uses silhouette paper cuts and is based on stories from the collection 1001 Arabian Nights.
The film will be accompanied by a live music score from Mackerel Sky, featuring an array of instruments, sounds and voices supplied by cellist and singer Ailsa Mair Hughes and multi-instrumentalist, Pixy Tom.
Festival organiser and storyteller Peter Stevenson will introduce the show with a Magical Lantern featurette from his Cabinet of Curiosities, followed by an illustrated biography of Lotte Reiniger herself.
On the Saturday Christine Cooper and Ceri Rhys Matthews return for an evening ramble with Ceri through folk music and memory inspired by long, solo walks along the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path.
Fans of Grimms Fairy Tales will enjoy an event led by Martin Maudsley with another appearance from Ailsa Mair Hughes, which refuses to tell the happy ever after and transforms the endings of well-known tales.
Meanwhile, Your Man's Puppets return with a Musical Menagerie and a singing sloth.
Phil Okwedy tells Tales of the Welsh Drovers while Peter Stevenson, Ceri Owen-Jones, Elsa Davies and Valeriane Leblond will lead audiences into an encounter with the dark Otherworld of the Shaking Tale.
There will also be puppets from the French Puppetry Company, Tales from Mauritius, winter tales for kids with Milly Jackdaw and Jo Vagabondi, story circles with Guto Dafis, David Ambrose, Amanda Smith and Cath Little.
Aberystwyth Storytelling Festival returns to Aberystwyth Arts Centre, 6-8 December.
Full details of the festival can be found on the website: http://aberstoryfestival.wordpress.com/
