Each festival we are grateful to welcome industry professionals from around the world to Glasgow. Join us for a day of connecting with colleagues, experiencing new work in development and hearing from exceptional artists from across Scotland.

SCHEDULE

10:00 Arrival: Coffees / ZU-UK: EVERYTHING IS BURNING
11:00 Scottish Artist Pitches
12:30 Lunch
14:00 Scottish Artist Pitches
15:00 Handle With Care or ZU-UK: EVERYTHING IS BURNING
16:00 Handle With Care or ZU-UK: EVERYTHING IS BURNING

On registration you will be allocated the 15:00 or 16:00 slot to see Ontrorend Goed / Handle With Care.

There are three opportunities to experience a new work in progress by ZU-UK: EVERYTHING IS BURNING/Tudo Está Queimando (work in progress); An audio and touch-led interactive installation that will be presented at COP30 in Belém (Brazil) - carving a space for local/international disabled-led creative voices to be heard (and their lived experiences to be felt) about what the Climate Crisis means to them.

PITCHES

Hear about new work in development from some of Scotland’s most exciting performance makers

Thulani Rachia The Land Wants Us Back
Rosana Cade, Ivor MacAskill, Tim Spooner & Yas Clarke NOW NOT NOW
21Common Regina Caeli
Kirstin Halliday Desert Whiptail Grassland Lizards
Mele Broomes Dictations

Thulani Rachia - The Land Wants Us Back

Thulani Rachia is a South African artist working across performance, music composition, and sculpture.

His broader inquiry—rooted in his research-based practice *Siwaguba kanjani amaphupho ethu agqitjwe kulezindonga?* (isiZulu for “How do we excavate the dreams laid to rest in these walls?”)—centers on two key processes in his work in relation to colonial legacies: critique and recovery.

His work has been exhibited at institutions and festivals both nationally and internationally including São Paulo-Arte; Bluecoat, Liverpool; Subsolo Laboratorio de Art São Paulo; Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art and Edinburgh Art Festival.

The Land wants Us back is an immersive performance combining sound, choreography, and scenography to reimagine our relationship to land. Using the lawn as a portal, it agitates the colonial legacy of this seemingly neutral landscape and critiques the politics of ownership, cultivation, and control. The lawnmower is recast as a “death machine,” its mechanical roar transformed through iGwijo—Xhosa collective hymn traditions of ceremony, protest, and reclamation—into a human chorus of resistance and ecological awakening.

Kirstin Halliday - Desert Grassland Whiptail Lizards: Act 1

Kirstin Halliday (they/them) is a dance artist & performer based in Glasgow who has choreographed, facilitated & performed in diverse contexts including; visual arts, music videos, club nights & community dance workshops. Grounded by their research background in Geography, their movement practice is motivated by the co-generative relation between moving bodies, social space, & interpersonal relations & identities. Their research at University of Glasgow & University of Iceland focused on emotional geographies, the geographies of the body, gender & movement. This research ignited questions relating to bodily agency, identity & resistance through movement, questions that drive their work to date, as they consider the dancing body as a site of queer potentiality & gender fluidity.

Desert Grassland Whiptail Lizards: Act 1 is a dance-drama, the reimagines this species as an all-lesbian fantasy world. Desert Grassland Whiptail Lizards are an all-female species that live in the deserts of New Mexico. Notably, they reproduce without fertilisation, but still stimulate each other to bring on ovulation. Near the laying period, one lizard will mount another. This has earned the species the reputation of “lesbian lizards.”

Co-choreographed by Aniela Piasecka and combining absurdist choreography with documentary style storytelling, Desert Grassland Whiptail Lizards: Act 1, is the first segment of a body of work that will culminate in a triptych, exploring the fetishization of lesbians and the active reconfiguration of the cisheteronormative male gaze.

Rosana Cade, Ivor MacAskill, Tim Spooner & Yas Clarke - NOW NOT NOW

Rosana Cade, Ivor MacAskill, Tim Spooner and Yas Clarke are 4 experimental theatre artists with different skills and individual practices, having worked together over the past 5 years on on the highly successful show, 'The Making of Pinocchio’ - a semi-autobiographical mid-scale theatre show, that blends live performance and video to create a multi-media spectacular about trans relationships, queer possibilities and what it means to be ‘real’. It continues to tour internationally. This was a Cade & MacAskill production, with Yas Clarke as sound designer and Tim Spooner designing set and costume. Finding an affinity in our ideas and sense of humour, and a fluidity in the roles we took whilst working together, we decided to begin making a new work as equal collaborators with joint roles in the process.

NOW NOT NOW will be an ambitious and experimental new theatrical production which will use layers of stage, sound and video craft to break open a fixed notion of Time. The work will build on our expertise of embedding video into live performance to reveal new perspectives. In an era with a pervasive sense of time running out on a personal and global scale, the show will open up our contemporary relationship to time in a unique and mind-bending theatrical experience.

21common - Regina Caeli

21Common blend iconoclastic references, pop culture and preoccupation with risk and danger to create spectacular dance experiences, creating work that consistently challenges the notion of who can be an artist and amplifying those most under-represented in that role.

Their latest work, presented at Take Me Somewhere in the second week, is Regina Caeli.

Regina Caeli explores a life lived together; framed by funeral rituals, a dodgy children’s choir and the music of Eric Carmen.

Artist Lucy Gaizely asks Gary Gardiner, her partner of 23 years, to collaborate in crafting a posthumous finale for her recently deceased Father, an activity which also maps the trajectory of their relationship. An immersive audience experience, Regina Caeli uses spatial audio technology to recreate the movements of Heavenly objects, euphoric joy and the Fear of God coupled with an AI generated dance dialogue exploring autonomous and complex movement simulations representing our past, present, and future selves.

Mele Broomes - Dictations

Mele Broomes is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, renowned for her performances that blend dance, sound, and striking poetics. Incorporating vocals and melodies, Mele transforms performance into a hybrid of theatre and live music. Her experimental, layered, and emotive vocals amplify both the emotional and physical dimensions of her storytelling.

Mele’s works and performances (have been presented at venues and festivals, including Battersea Arts Centre (London), The Place (London), Festival del Silenzio Mila, Theatre Centre (Canada), Cultura Inglesa Festival (Brazil), Edinburgh Art Festival, Dance International Glasgow, Whitechapel Gallery, and more.

As the founder of Body Remedy and co-founder of Project X Dance, two Community Interest Companies focused on professional development, Mele has spent the past decade establishing Black and POC-led organisations. She leads both creatively and strategically, contributing to the wider cultural sector in Scotland. In 2026, Mele will focus on a new Glasgow-based multidisciplinary performance company.
www.melebroomes.com

Dictations features a cast of 10, including dancers and a live vocalist. It is the first official production from Mele’s new Glasgow-based performance company, launching in Spring 2026.

The work explores the duality of control and surrender—how much of our lives we can actively dictate, and how much is shaped by forces beyond our control. At its core, the performance reflects on love, sacrifice, and the legacies carried through our relationships. 

The Industry Day is supported by The British Council & Impact Arts.