PREVIEW: Llawn05 (Llandudno Arts Festival 2017)

Llawn is a free arts festival that celebrates and explores Llandudno through art, artefact, sound, comedy, performance and participation. This is its fifth successive year, and across the weekend visitors to the North Wales seaside resort can explore this work in unusual and surprising places, including baptist chapels, empty shops, shipping containers and even a set of Victorian bathing machines! Past Llawns have also featured work in the caves of the Great Orme, and on the roof of Venue Cymru!

So what has the arts festival weekend got up its sleeve for visitors this year? Curators Lisa Heledd Jones and John Rostron have lined up a plethora of stunning, inspiring and entertaining works. The fun kicks off on Friday, September 15th and continues throughout Saturday and Sunday too. Here's a guide to some of the best, most unusual and exciting exhibits and presentations to catch:

Preview of Llawn04 Llandudno Arts Weekend

Llandudno Art Festival – Llawn04 – returns this September, a whole weekend of free events along the promenade and across various venues and spaces in the North Wales seaside resort.

There'll be performance, street games, music, robot-making, dance, visual art, film and the unexpected, all inspired by this year's theme of Hide/ Seek.

It opens with a few treats on Friday, September 23rd and then there's a weekend full of events on Saturday 24th and Sunday 25th. Days and exact timings will be announced in August, but for now you can browse all the activity that will be coming and start to plan what you'd like to see.

Llawn03 (Llandudno Arts Festival) Day 3

Have you ever wondered what language mermaids speak? No, neither had I, not until I saw Bedraggled on Day 3 of Llawn03 and found out the perfectly obvious truth: they speak flobalob (a bit like the Flowerpot Men!).

Yes, welcome to the crazy, surreal and slightly fractured world of the Kitsch 'n' Sync collective. On Day 2 they flabbergasted us with the sci-fi silliness of Babs and Stella, but Bedraggled was a step beyond. This comic dance theatre performance consisted of three mermaids washed ashore who dance well in unison (despite their flippers) but who lose their tempers easily and even turn an unsuspecting audience member into their marine deity, complete with a plastic octopus on his head.

Llawn03 (Llandudno Arts Festival) Day 2

Definition of 'different': a tour of Llandudno's lost theatres aboard a red double-decker bus festooned with pink balloons, accompanied by a drag queen singing operatic arias and a mute who likes to act out through the medium of mime.

That's Divina and Dymphna's Day-Glo Bus Tour in a rather cracked nutshell. And it was fabulous! The bus was originally to have been an open-topped affair, so it was a shame it wasn't in the end as Divina De Campo's stacked high-heel boots made her so tall that she couldn't stand up straight with a roof on top! But it made the tour a much more intimate affair. As we were driven around Llandudno's "treacherous one-way system" to visit the former locations or currently derelict theatres of the resort, Divina educated us in her own amusing style about the buildings' history, their origins, heydays and downfalls, while Dymphna D'Arcy careered up and down the aisle acting out Divina's commentary.

Llawn03 (Llandudno Arts Festival) Day 1

Anybody out for a few beers in Llandudno on Friday night might be mistaken for thinking their drinks had been spiked when they saw a group of people dressed in white smocks and wearing blank, white face masks gathering outside a disused garage in the heart of the town.

It made for a surreal experience, but this was not a bizarre religious sect or a re-enactment of the unsettling Solutions section of The League of Gentlemen's Christmas special (if you've never seen it, where have you been?!). It was the meeting place for Joel Cockrill's installation Ffloc, an immersive experience which converts an old mechanic's garage on Mostyn Broadway into a walk-through world of loud music, projections and bilingual voiceovers.

Preview of Llawn03 (Llandudno Arts Festival 2015)

There can't be many arts festivals which use such diverse locations as a cave, a pier, a ski slope, a bandstand and even a Victorian-style bathing machine to host its events, exhibitions and "happenings".

But Llawn03 – Llandudno's third annual arts festival, held over a three-day weekend in September – is full of surprises like that. The aim of Llawn is to rediscover and celebrate the rich history of the North Wales seaside resort in new and refreshing ways, not just through the usual artistic methods of theatre, dance and song, but also performance art, interactive events, an open-air theatre, and even a bus tour conducted by a drag queen!