Advance Notice: Word of Warning's Autumn Season

Tamsin Drury has been active in the Northwest's theatre scene for several decades, having set up theatre production company hÅb alongside Helen Cole with an aim to discover, promote and develop emerging artists. After their first decade and a half spent in Manchester's much-missed Greenroom, hÅb is now run from Z-arts, a former church turned community arts centre in Hulme whose other residents include urban dance specialists DiGM, and ODD Theatre – and since January 2012, hÅb have run Word of Warning, a programme of contemporary theatre and performance with a difference.

Word of Warning's autumn season opens on 5 October with Emergency, a free, 11-hour event featuring short works staged at BLANKSPACE and Z-arts, for which 25 participants were selected from an open call, with submissions ranging from postgraduate university students to anyone who simply fancied having a go. Those taking part include London-based collective Drunken Chorus and immersive theatremakers Collective Unconscious. Describing it as a “lucky dip” of performance styles, Drury is keen to emphasise that Emergency is a way for anyone curious about experiencing live art to get involved. She explains: “Nothing fixes you in a space for longer than 15 to 20 minutes, so if you don't like that one there'll be another along soon. A lot of it is silly and playful and really moving at a visceral level. We spend far too much time saying, 'Is it art?' But a lot of it is a moment, an image or a feeling. And some works do challenge you intellectually, but not in a way that's inaccessible.”

Emergency is also a platform for work in progress, such as Nathan Birkinshaw's durational piece That Night Recurring. Staged in the bar of Z-arts, the piece contains, he says, “an elliptical narrative around alcohol and love and loneliness.” For an emerging artist like Birkinshaw, Word of Warning is a platform to experiment and develop: “In the last show,” he continues, “we drank a bottle of rum in a bathtub and pretended to be pirates, which was fun. This one's a little bit more serious. And it's whiskey-based."

From 8 to 17 November runs Domestic – a series of interventions, live art and theatrical skullduggery – staged in Cooper House, an art deco block of flats in Hulme. Works include Mental, by the artist-activist known as 'the vacuum cleaner', an autobiographical work based on psychiatric records, police intelligence files and corporate injunctions; Jo Bannon's Exposure, which Drury describes as “a one-on-one piece in the dark with her trying to get you to see how she experiences light through her albinism”; and Alex Bradley and Scott Smith's Field Test in Garageland, a sound installation in, yes, a garage. There's also Small Acts' Shower Scenes, an attempt to recreate Psycho in a bathroom. “Yes, you do have to get your kit off and have a shower,” laughs Drury, promising that it's a unique but completely private experience.

Elsewhere, Word of Warning have collaborated with Contact to stage The Ugly Sisters (11, 12 Oct), a reworking of Cinderella from University of Hull graduates RashDash, which Drury terms “raucous, dark but fun... a fucked-up panto, basically” – while the season finale on 29 Nov at Z-arts is The Falsettos, a one-woman reimagining of The Sopranos from comedian-turned-performance-maker Stacy Makishi.

Things don't let up, though: next year will be another busy one for the company, with separate spring and summer seasons. Similar to Emergency, Turn will be a platform for emerging danceworks from Northwest companies, while Hazard is a day of performances across Manchester city centre that in past years has seen Cathedral Gardens wrapped in 6km of hazard tape, and a failed attempt to circumnavigate the city by canoe. There's also Works Ahead, a follow-on event to Emergency with selected works re-staged at Contact. Drury considers it “a barometer for us to see the health of theatre and art in the region and the country. There'll be four or five pieces we've nurtured so the audience can see that development outcome.” This desire to foster new talent and take risks is clearly central to hÅb's values – leading to the creation of an exciting programme of work well worth checking out.