A city. Just like this. Right now. A teenage girl boils up in rage in a toilet cubicle. A finance worker preaches doom in a busy train station. An absurd coke-addled celebrity races through town on a mission. A paranoid stoner stares blankly at the endless disasters on the TV news. In just one moment, all their worlds will end.

Multi-award-winner Kieran Hurley weaves a picture of a familiar city at its moment of destruction, asking what would we do if we found ourselves at the end of our world as we know it.

2016 Scotsman Fringe First award winner. Edinburgh Festival Fringe sell-out run.

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Presented by Show & Tell.

Explosive guerrilla-gig-theatre from Julia Taudevin, with music by Kim Moore with Susan Bear and Beldina Odenyo. This fierce and playful feminist work explores the psychology of extremism with haunting melodies and progressive punk riffs.

This performance was followed by a post show discussion about politics in theatre, chaired by journalist and Scotsman theatre critic Joyce McMillan.

“Half Pixies-style rock gig, half angry spoken word, it’s about sexual stereotyping, capitalist alienation and getting your voice heard.” – The Scotsman

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Julia Taudevin with Kim Moore, and Susan Bear & Beldina Odenyo. Co-directed by Graham Eatough. Supported by PRS for Music Foundation.

What would you do if there was a war tomorrow?

This epic, visceral performance is a dark comedy about the awakening of ‘awareness’ in young people today. It features a massive cast of participants and is set in a dystopian fantasy future in three different cities.

El Conde de Torrefiel is one of the most exciting and provocative theatre companies to emerge from Spain in recent years. This newest work, Guerrilla, presents the inner universe of a group of young people that inhabit the same moment in time in their respective cities, and are affected to a greater or lesser degree by the same consequences. Even so, they don’t know how to face a world that has changed too much since the beginning of the 20th century and that is in constant need of new rules.

Access, as published in 2017

As published in 2017: this piece has surtitles. Warning: loud music and flashing strobe. Running time 85 minutes.

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Performed with 80 Glasgow volunteers recruited through an open call. Tramway bar celebration after the Sat 25 Feb performance, launching the festival publication GRIP with music from the Tron Community Choir.

Lucy and Raedie are Mother and Son. They both REALLY love the singer Sia. They love her music, her videos and especially her hair. They love the way it moves in a choppy, black-on-platinum swivel.

They decided to use the iconic motifs of this Australian pop superstar to make their own performance. Somehow Sia became the catalyst in examining this relationship between a 14-year-old son and his 37-year-old mother, between a legally identified adult and child, Woman and Boy, and two artists creating and sharing something.

This high-energy performance exposes the inherent narcissism that is at the centre of motherhood and how this becomes a burden to the child embarking on adulthood. It shares something of Lucy and Raedie, past and present. It discovers their new dynamic.

So hold on for dear life through this all singing, all dancing journey of rejection and nurture, disappointment and interdependency, of transforming, growing, hurting and becoming…

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Supported by Imaginate.

For one night only – a promenade show devised and directed by Andy Arnold.

In the fading memory of his Arches roots, Andy Arnold and his troupe will take guests on an absurd journey down corridors and up stairwells and into backstage passages to meet strange characters reciting even stranger stories. This theatrical experience, a nod to Beckett, existentialism, surrealism, with a bit of Dada for good measure, will show you parts of the Tron and parts of yourselves you may never have seen before.

A robot made its debut performance in Nowhere, powered by sounds contributed by the public through an open call.

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Devised and directed by Andy Arnold with Tron Theatre Company.

Artist(s) In Residence(s) is a new immersive curated project, that exists in the homes of the unknown artists of the city you live in. For one time only at each event, a new artist will open their home to allow for a glimpse at the private practice of their creativity. Each event invites you to experience the art work where it is made, and listen to the artist speak about why it is they do what they do. Together we will look at the complexity of how we value art and artists, question how it is legitimised or celebrated, and as these are all people who have not chosen art as a career, consider who gets to call themselves an artist anyway?

Peter McMaster is a live artist living and working in Glasgow and internationally, and was the first Take Me Somewhere Artist In Residence. In keeping with his latest enquiries into the spaces he takes up as a white man, he approached this invitation to ‘reside’ as an artist in the space of the festival in ways that honour the stories of those other than his. Peter is interested in an arts practice of equality, where the outcome of his work allows space for the ‘other’ to be seen.

Access, as published in 2017

As published in 2017: each event had very limited capacity.

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A collaboration between the National Theatre of Scotland and Take Me Somewhere, with support from Glasgow University.

#negrophobia examines the erotic fear associated with the Black body inside the context of the contemporary American project. The work is both performance lecture and ritual séance. Jaamil Olawale Kosoko juxtaposes interior and exterior landscapes to expose a confessional identity-mashup where visual and performance aesthetics collide in a face-off of self-revelation, ecstatic theatricality, and discomfort. Revealing contradictory feelings of desire and fear, #negrophobia references issues related to grief, misogyny, trans identity, and Black patriarchal constructs of masculinity.

Together with model, performance artist, and night-life personality IMMA, and composer Jeremy Toussaint Baptiste, Kosoko presents the audience with powerfully staged bodies, forcing them to contemplate how they might also be involved in the construction of forms of racism.

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UK premiere, presented along with SICK! Festival, Brighton. With IMMA and Jeremy Toussaint Baptiste.

SOMEWHERE NEW is a brand new award for contemporary theatre & performance makers, from Take Me Somewhere and the Citizens Theatre. The award is an opportunity for a Scottish artist to develop and present a new theatre/performance project at the Citizens Theatre as part of the Take Me Somewhere festival.

Avoidable Climbing is a poetic political black comedy, written and directed by Drew Taylor, about what we could do, what we should do and how burying your face in the latest cat video isn’t enough right now.

Following the performance, a playlet from Fear And Misery Of The Third Reich by Bertolt Brecht was delivered.

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Presented in collaboration with Citizens Theatre. Supported by The Goldberg Charitable Trust in memory of Michael Goldberg. Photo: James Taylor-Wilson.

A night of raw, gig-theatre happenings.

This first, very special Take Me Somewhere Scratch Night was created to take forward the experimental, beat-driven energy of The Arches, bringing together the best local bands or musicians with contemporary performance makers – two elements that were at the core of the former venue’s programme. Three projects were performed scratch-style over the course of the evening, each blurring and exploring the connections between contemporary performance and popular music.

ALAN MCKENDRICK with SMACK WIZARDS. Theatre director Alan McKendrick worked with two actors/vocalists and members of Glasgow avant-psych instrumental trio Smack Wizards, to create a performance entitled ‘Cadaver Police In The Electrocution Afterlife’, which incarnated a temporary band crammed in a taxi after their tour bus has broken down, in a Wilsonian ‘knee play’.

TUT VU VU with MORVEN MULGREW. Glasgow based three-piece experimental band Tut Vu Vu (Matthew Black, Jamie Bolland and Raydale Dower) collaborated with London-based sculptor and absurdist costume designer Morven Mulgrew, to create a live performance with sculptural forms and musique concrete, working through Erik Satie’s one act proto-Dadaist play LE PIÈGE DE MÉDUSE (1913).

ULTIMATE DANCER with FRITZ WELCH. Dance artist Ultimate Dancer (a.k.a. Louise Ahl) reunited with sculptor and musician Fritz Welch (Asparagus Piss Raindrop / The Final Five / Lambs Gamble) to develop their one hit wonder pop song ‘Banana Freedom’ into a live durational post funk performance, in a re-imagination of a piece originally developed as part of the last Arches LIVE festival in 2014.

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Take Me Somewhere and Platform. Programmed to connect with the Somewhere New award winner at the Citizens Theatre.

The Art of Care-full Practice: taking care of others and the self in participatory performance. An intimate, one day symposium responding to the fact that the involvement of non-professional participants is a key mode of performance making.

Questions explored included: how do we ensure the practice of working with non-professional participants in the processes and production of performance is ethical? How do we care for the other(s) in work that might be difficult, challenging, demanding? How do we care for the self in work that requires complex configuration of aesthetics, relations and responsibilities?

The schedule included short provocations from Simon Murray, Laura Gonzalez and Stephen Greer; long-table discussions; a care café; a screening of Quarantine’s film Winter. accompanied by a dialogue between Richard Gregory and Michael Brady; film documentation of the work of Adrian Howells; and a demonstration of emerging work from Nic Green, the first recipient of the Adrian Howells Award for Intimate Performance.

Access, as published in 2017

As published in 2017: numbers were limited to 50 and places were allocated by application. The symposium was free, with costs met by the host organisations.

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Organised by Dee Heddon, Simon Murray, Laura Bissell and Laura Gonzalez. Hosted by the University of Glasgow, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and Glasgow School of Art.

Mandy is 50 years old. She lives in York, has two children and four dogs. Mandy also has terminal lung cancer.

Winter. is a delicate portrait of Mandy King-Holmes, made by filmmakers Rachel Davies and Daniel Saul, when Mandy was in the last months of her life. She died in April 2016 from lung cancer. The film – created in widescreen triptych form – approaches the ways in which Mandy’s knowledge of time running out affects how she deals with the everyday, impacts upon her plans for the future and her reflection on her own history.

Winter. was premiered at Easter 2016 as part of Summer. Autumn. Winter. Spring., Quarantine’s quartet of performance and film about our relationship with time. Quarantine is one of the UK’s leading contemporary theatre companies, with an international reputation for their experiments in everyday life.

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Filmmakers Rachel Davies and Daniel Saul. This presentation at Gilmorehill Centre was supported by University of Glasgow, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and Glasgow School of Art. Co-producing partners for Summer. Autumn. Winter. Spring. were Compass Festival, Contact, Dublin Theatre Festival, Göteborgs Dans & Teater Festival, HOME, In Between Time, Lancaster Arts, Northern Stage and SICK! Festival. Development of Winter. supported by National Theatre Wales. Summer. Autumn. Winter. Spring. received an Arts Council England Exceptional Award.

The winner of the inaugural Adrian Howells Award in 2017 was Nic Green.

Adrian Howells (1962–2014) was one of the world’s leading figures in the field of one to one and intimate performance. Over two decades he developed an artistic practice that focused on the particular power and transformative possibility that could be achieved through creating a profound, immediate and personal connection to his audiences. The Adrian Howells Award aims to celebrate the particular type of intimate work that Adrian pioneered and excelled at, as well as providing an opportunity to explore new territories in this field of practice.

Nic Green is an award-winning performance practitioner whose extensive body of work includes varied community and public art projects, holistic learning experiences, interactive web-based projects and musical/audio composition. She is best known for her Trilogy, which received an estimated 1000 participants and won the Arches Platform 18 Award, a Dublin Fringe Festival Award and a Herald Angel Award.

As the inaugural recipient, Nic was given the opportunity to explore a project idea in two stages, initially in Glasgow and subsequently in London at Battersea Arts Centre, with £4,000 towards the creation of the project and performances in both cities.

Nic said on winning the award: ‘I am pleased to receive the Adrian Howells Award for Intimate Performance, and it comes at a timely moment for me in the trajectory of my life and work as an artist. I feel it is an honour to make a work in Adrian’s memory… I will use this opportunity to develop a form initially explored in 2015 with Forest Fringe and the 20th Century Museum in Kanazawa, Japan, which facilitates the transformation of words donated by an individual, into the songs of birds. The Adrian Howells Award opportunity will help me discover how this form might be in service to people approaching death. In light of this I will be collaborating with experts and carers working in end of life care, to discover how best this work may be used in the complex context of these situations.’

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Produced and developed by Take Me Somewhere. Supported by the National Theatre of Scotland, Battersea Arts Centre, the University of Glasgow and the Live Art Development Agency.

As part of the consultation process led by Jackie Wylie following The Arches closure in 2014, artists were asked to contribute radical ideas to a ‘Glasgow Imaginary Festival’ in collaboration with artist Andy Field. Robert Softley Gale’s contribution DISCOURSE OR INTERCOURSE / TALKING & F*CKING was developed into a real, live experience.

We all want to see ourselves reflected in the world around us – in society, in art, in culture… in porn? When you’re disabled, do you get that option? And what is it to get your rocks off watching someone in a wheelchair fucking?

This immersive performance explores disability and pornography. You’ll be one of two audience members to enter the space – you can choose whether to watch video clips of ‘discourse’ or ‘intercourse’ (or both). Next there will be a bit of talking… and maybe fucking – it’s up to you as to where things go next.

Followed by the SISSY AFTER PARTY with DJ Kaiserin aka Ari Silvera, 9pm–late, free, at the CCA.

Access, as published in 2017

As published in 2017: durational, in 20 minute slots, two audience members at a time.

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Listed in 2017 as Robert Softley; the artist now works as Robert Softley Gale.

Britain is in a state of perpetual war. As we remember one, we embark upon another. We arm ourselves. We arm our enemies. We misremember.

Amidst the rise of military presence in civilian life, from our sporting events to recruitment in our schools, we are constantly presented with the acceptable face of the British armed forces, yet always distracted from the visceral horrors of warfare.

Inspired by war poetry, veteran interviews, and the actions of radical resistors of militarism, We Are A Peaceful People seeks to understand how the rhetoric and imagery of battle defines what we remember and what we have been asked to forget.

As part of her Playwrights’ Studio Scotland Writers Project, Evans invited audiences to share in an early reading of this new work, which delves into questions of patriotism, heroism and aggression, searching out the emotive spaces where these overlap. Perhaps in the chorus of dissenting voices we may yet find a hope for peace.

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Supported by Playwrights’ Studio Scotland.

The Queen of Ireland Panti invites you into her gender-discombobulating, stiletto shaped world, exposing stories behind the make-up – from performance giant to accidental activist – to reveal the national f*cking treasure she is today.

In 2014, Panti landed herself in a legal shitstorm, dubbed Pantigate. Her speech about homophobia went viral, was broadcast worldwide, remixed by Pet Shop Boys, caused a parliamentary meltdown and fed into Ireland’s marriage equality referendum success.

Hilarious and poignant, Panti traces her journey from small-town boy kicking against traditions to towering plastique woman in false lashes making history.

★★★★ “Leaves lipstick traces on both heart and mind.” – Guardian

★★★★ “A wise, hilarious, foul-mouthed jolt to the system.” – Time Out

★★★★★ “Exquisitely tart-tongued comedy… electrically revealing and masterful.” – Irish Times

★★★★ “Comic genius.” – Irish Independent

Access, as published in 2017

As published in 2017: this performance was BSL interpreted.

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Written and performed by Panti. Directed by Phillip McMahon. Presented by Soho Theatre and THISISPOPBABY. Part of STUCK ON YOU, a strand of queer work co-produced by Outspoken Arts.

Lucy McCormick’s Triple Threat retells the New Testament as a trashy pop spectacular, with McCormick playing every part and two backing dancers along for the ride. The show won a Brick Award and toured widely after its Edinburgh run.

Note for the archive: the original Take Me Somewhere listing page for this show is no longer reachable. The details above are reconstructed from Take Me Somewhere’s Sticky listing and the artist’s own website, and are not verbatim 2017 festival copy.

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Commissioned by hÅb and Contact for Works Ahead, with support from Soho Theatre and The Marlborough, and funded by Arts Council England.

Across multiple rooms and two dancefloors, the UK’s wildest queer performers gather to generate a shapeshifting landscape of the sticky revolution. With kaleidoscopic performance, intimate-installations, raging cabaret and transcendent tunes, this is a call to take up space; for ourselves, for our bodies and for the power of togetherness.

Performance: JOHNSMITH, MARTIN O’BRIEN, DOUBLE PUSSY CLIT F*CK, FRANKIE MULHOLLAND, SGAIRE WOOD, NIMA SENE & LAOISE, THULANI RACHIA. Tunes: FI FI CHOPS, JUNGLE HUSSY, LETITA PLEIADES.

Free entry with a Lucy McCormick Triple Threat ticket, and for asylum seekers or those on benefits.

Access, as published in 2017

As published in 2017: performances were BSL interpreted, with BSL support in the bar and ticket area. All used spaces in The Glue Factory were wheelchair accessible on the ground floor with access to an accessible toilet. A quiet room was available.

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Part of STUCK ON YOU, a sticky strand of queer spectacles at Take Me Somewhere 2017, programmed by a local gang of displaced queerdos and co-produced by Outspoken Arts.