LEADING Scottish and international artists feature in a wide ranging programme of ground-breaking contemporary dance, theatre, visual arts, film, talks and events this autumn at one of the country’s most innovative theatres.

A former tram depot, Glasgow’s Tramway is now one of the most prestigious spaces in Scotland for artists to present new work.

It is the venue for The National Theatre of Scotland’s first-ever festival of participatory arts, Home and Away, from October 8 to 12. Ten new hour-long theatre pieces from around the world, created by prominent international artists working alongside non-professional participants from ten communities, will be staged, accompanied by an art industry symposium.

Before that Tramway’s own Unlimited Festival will showcase new visual art, theatre, dance and multi-media work from internationally acclaimed disabled artists, including Glasgow-based choreographers and dancers Claire Cunningham and Marc Brew, along with a programme of discussions and events. The final day of the festival from September 15-25 will be a Family Day, packed with free drop-in fun and activities.

WHAT ARE THE HIGHLIGHTS?

TRAMWAY’S autumn programme kicks off with Flashlight Filmstrip Projections by American artist Jennifer West who will transform Tramway 2 into a cinematic playground with a screen-less, communal viewing space in which audiences using handheld torches will activate film strips suspended throughout the gallery. West is primarily known for her manipulations of film stock and this new work harks back to pre-cinematic experimentalism while also presenting an unusual contemporary afterlife for an increasingly obsolete medium. It runs from September 2 until October 30.

From September 7 to 10 in Tramway 1, artists and leaders in the field of inclusive dance will come together for Indepen-dance’s Gathered Together 2016. Participants will share practice and approaches to engagement in integrated dance across different international, economic, social and political contexts.

The month ends with Gary Clarke’s COAL, a powerful dance theatre show from a company of seven professional dancers, a local community cast of women and members of the Kirkintilloch Band.

WHAT ELSE?

IN October, Arika will host Episode 8: Refuse Powers’ Grasp, a celebration of all the ways people refuse to be defined by imprisonment, categorisation and segregation by race, class, gender or ability. It features performances, discussions, screenings and workshops with gender non-conformists, lawyers, archivists, anarcho-feminist street artists, witches, party hosts, filmmakers, prison abolitionists, poets, DJs, ex-prisoners and multi-media artists in spaces throughout Tramway.

Ballet Black, a company for international dancers of black and Asian descent, collaborates with three bold and inventive choreographers to present a trilogy of narrative and abstract dance in Tramway 1 on October 28 and 29. The centrepiece of the performances is Christopher Hampson’s Storyville, the bittersweet fable of Nola, a farm girl who falls prey to unscrupulous characters and worldly desires in 1920s New Orleans, set to the music of Kurt Weill. Hampson is Scottish Ballet’s artistic director.

Tramway’s annual Artists’ Moving Image Festival (AMIF), will once again challenge the conventions of the cinema space, presenting a series of screenings, workshops, performances and discussions in Tramway 1 on November 5 and 6. Programmed by filmmaker and writer Ed Webb-Ingall and artist Sarah Tripp, the festival is co-organised with LUX Scotland.

ANY MORE?

STILL on the film front, The Big Picture Show brings a season of films especially for tots, teens and parents to Tramway 2 from November 10 to December 11. Programmed by LUX Scotland and developed in collaboration with artists and their children, a series of experimental, narrative and performance-based works take a magical and mysterious path through the world of the moving image.

An exhibition of work from the past decade along with new pieces from 2016 by New York-based painter Ella Kruglyanskaya will be presented in collaboration with Tate Liverpool from October 12 to December 11 in Tramway 5. Kruglyanskaya’s paintings immerse viewers in a bold world of colour and high contrast patterns, populated almost exclusively by imagined female characters caught in moments of dramatic tension.

A single ticket gives audiences the chance to experience two shows on the evenings of November 18 and 19. Beginning in Tramway 4, Mette Edvardson’s Black is a solo performance about making things appear. In Katrina Brown and Rosanna Irvine’s What Remains And Is To Come, the audience moves freely through the space of Tramway 1 to witness up close increasing relations between paper, charcoal, bodies and breath.

AND THE REST?

LIVE installations run concurrently in Tramway 1 and Tramway 4 on November 26 and 27 between 12 noon and 5pm. Assembly is a live gallery work by Nicola Conibere in Tramway 1 while choreographers Adam York Gregory and Gillian Jane Lees present two task-based performances and experiments in Tramway 4. On November 26 in Present Tense, the performers back themselves into the corner by setting several hundred mousetraps, each one adding to a growing sense of tension. In Constants and Variables on November 27, the performer attempts to transport spoonfuls of black ink across her white paper dress.

Bringing together elements from dance, theatre and storytelling, Dundee-based company Joan Clevillé Dance create a space for reflection where audience and performers can come together to re-imagine the world in Plan B for Utopia on December 2 and 3 in Tramway 1.

Prior to these performances on both December 2 and 3, Brocade from the mysteryskin company celebrates energetic alliances between unique female dancers and musicians.

To find out more visit www.tramway.org.