SVEN! Come to manipulate 2015

Werner has even arranged his transport to the traverse

Sven Werner first came to Glasgow's attention through Cryptic and his Tales of Magical Realism: most recently he took his peep-show performance around the stations of Scotland, evoking the magic of train travel as a finale to Homecoming Year. His distinctive fusion of film, music, storytelling and intelligent, immersive live performance makes him a hard artist to categorise, but an easy one to enjoy.

Given Werner's enthusiasms for the visual, he's bound to come across to manipulate 2015, but he'll need some help selecting which events he'd enjoy. Luckily, I'll stop at nothing to ensure that he has a good time. These suggestions, of course, would also stand for anyone who enjoys the tainted nostalgia and sinister journeys that Werner plots.

Mr Carmen (Theatre Akhe)
In some ways, it's too easy to recommend Akhe; they have been regular visitors to Scotland over the past decade, and their approach to theatre (they call it architecture) highlights the importance of scenography, as the set becomes a character in their productions. Mr Carmen has the vigorous energy associated with Russian experimental theatre, a surreal atmosphere and a play-off between the two performers and their constantly evolving set.

Power and Puppets (Claire Lamond)
Lamond shares three of her own works and a selection of animations that have inspired her. Politics is at the heart of these shorts, but expressed in an intimate and personal way.

Autumn Portraits (Sandglass)
It's melancholic, it's bunraku puppetry (the type with the men in black), it has five connected vignettes, it asks big questions about the nature of aging. What's not to love?

Oppressed Creatures (Ulo Pikkov)
Animation fun from one of Estonia's favourite animators; dark humour and surreal worlds, with some bonus shorts from Poland.

Tales of Magical Realism

Tales of Magical Realism (part 2) follows on from Sven Werner's successful Cryptic Night, leading the audience, one by one, through four more episodes of the film-maker's mechanical film installation. A narrative, half beat poet and half hard-boiled detective, guides the viewer through the peep-show theatres housed inside Tramway 4's elongated space, evoking the romanticism of a childhood journey that slowly sours into a totalitarian nightmare.

While waiting for the funding for his film to arrive - Werner admits that this can be a slow process - he decamped to Glasgow and began work on what would become these short scenarios. It is difficult to define Tales: starting off with a small band and a chained dancer, the main presentation is divided into four short stories, each with their own viewing booth. Thanks to the headphones, every audience member must listen along, and the booths shut off the outside world. This magic is a solitary experience.



Three of the scenes are dedicated to travel - on a train, meeting a taxi at the station, the journey to a mythical city in the back of the taxi - while the fourth is, ironically, the destination: the viewer now having to cycle to power the light, and the character trapped in a factory that seems to generate light from human exertion. The anticipate of the first three chapters is cunningly flipped: the excitement of the open road's potential replace by the stasis of the city. Having built up the romance, Werner bleakly shifts gear, concluding on a despairing vision of modernity where humans are not replaced by machines but are forced to act like them.

The use of black and white imagery gives Tales a nostalgic atmosphere: the story is dream-like, and the music, which seems to have come from David Lynch's lost films, never lets the tension break. The sonorous voice, the matter-of-fact description of fantastic happenings, the hyper-real vision of the final destination: Werner catches the strict attention to detail and the loose symbolism that made magical realism bold and exciting when it first appeared from Latin America.