Between the lines

To walk through it is to sense that past, up close and personal. But as the building reopens this weekend, after six months in darkness, the focus is on the future. Once more, Glasgow's most interesting, most unwieldy arts venue is proving its talent for phoenix-like resurrection.

Not a handful of years ago, Tramway's fate seemed to hang in the balance. With audience figures dwindling and political supporters thin on the ground, it seemed poised to lose its autonomy in a deal which would have seen its main exhibition space taken over by Scottish Ballet. Now, after its second refurbishment in ten years, the grand old lady of Albert Drive is in better shape than she's ever been.

Notwithstanding, the builders will be around for another year, working on Scottish Ballet's new purpose-built headquarters in the connected building next door. But being a building site is nothing new. Tramway has been one on and off for two decades.

"Tramway has always been on the edge of change," says Steve Slater, the venue's senior producer, who has worked at the venue for 15 years. "It is down to the fact that, unusually for a building with such a big reputation and remit, there was never a plan for Tramway, it has very much evolved over 20 years."

So on the cusp of its 20th anniversary season, Tramway sits Janus-faced, looking to both past and future. It is appropriate that the opening weekend will be celebrated with Glimmers in Limbo, a series of interventions by artist Minty Donald, which traces layers of history while posing questions about the future.

Tramway was built in 1893 as Coplawhill Tram Depot, though, as Donald found out, it was also the city's tram factory. "They did everything, from the upholstery for the seating to a foundry where they forged the metal. If you were on a tram in Glasgow, pretty much every single thing on that tram was made from scratch here."

Trams are central to Donald's exploration of Tramway's past. Having imposed Glasgow's colour-coded tram map on the building, she invites visitors to follow a chosen route wherever it might take them: into the backstage areas or the ladies' toilets or even (by negotiation) the cleaners' room.

Each route is accompanied by an audio guide, to which visitors can add comments, and landmarks are highlighted, some in the building itself: the Brook Wall, Toby Paterson's door, and others in Glasgow in the 1890s: Crossmyloof Bakery, the City Poorhouse, the Royalty Theatre. Tramway's past is interwoven with that of the city.

"It's a juxtaposition of the here-and-now and the there-and-then," says Donald, a former theatre designer, whose work in Tramway is part of a three-year research project on site-specific art and the built environment. "I'm interested in finding out whether, if you are standing in the middle of Tramway 1 at the Industrial Schools Burial Ground, and you are told that it's where some of Glasgow's most deprived children are buried, you comment on that or on where you are now."

Meanwhile, in Tramway 2, the vast main exhibition space, visitors can push a trolley along tramlines in the floor, activating a DVD which will project film footage of modern-day Glasgow on to the wall. Donald made the films by travelling along the old tram routes, mapping the changes in the city. Some streets are pedestrianised, others have disappeared altogether.

The trolleys resemble museum cases, a nod to the building's time as Glasgow's Museum of Transport after the trams were axed in the 1960s. Many Glaswegians – Donald among them – recall being taken there. "I remember seeing the trams in the museum at quite a young age, and being really scared of this Victorian hearse that they had!" she says.

When the Museum moved to its current site at Kelvinhall in 1986, Tramway was earmarked for demolition. The job had begun at the rear of the building when director Peter Brook visited the site looking for a venue for his production of the Mahabharata. The story goes that as soon as he walked into Tramway, he knew he'd found his spot. The demolition was hastily halted.

After the success of the Mahabharata, Tramway became an occasional venue for site-specific theatre. Donald remembers Welsh Company Brith Gof's experimental production of The Gododdin in 1989, with music by Angus Farquhar's Test Dept. "It was just one of the most exciting things, I'd never seen anything like it," she remembers. "There was water and mud and people running around and throwing things at you. The music was industrial noise. And you had to stand outside in the rain before you got in because there were no facilities. Through Tramway I got exposed to things I'd never have had the chance to see; it was hugely exciting."

All the while, Glasgow was recognising the potential for culture as a lynchpin of urban regeneration, with programmers like Bob Palmer and Neil Wallace backing innovative performance arts. When the city won – to widespread surprise – its bid to become European City of Culture in 1990, Tramway hosted 40 performances including the first visit of Robert Lepage to Scotland, and Gerry Mulgrew's anarchic production of Liz Lochhead's Jock Tamson's Bairns.

A year later, Glasgow was on everyone's cultural map, no small thanks to Tramway. In 1991, one newspaper concluded: "The brightest legacy of Glasgow's year as City of Culture is surely the survival of Tramway." It was one of the first post-industrial spaces in the UK to find a new life as an arts venue: Baltic and Tate Modern should pay it homage.

But Tramway's future was anything but secure. "When I joined in the early 1990s, the infrastructure was teetering on its knees," says Steve Slater. "By 1997, rain was coming in through the roof, and discussion was going on: 'should we just close it or give it more money to move to the next level?' "

In the end, Tramway secured European Lottery funding for a 3.5million refurbishment by Zoo Architects, which opened up the upper floor and added extra facilities on the lower. For the first time, it was a fully-fledged arts venue, able to open all day, every day.

But that didn't guarantee footfall. Within a couple of years, the building was described as "underused", a big empty shell too far from the city centre for passing trade, too obscure in its programming of cutting-edge foreign theatre and large-scale conceptual art. "I don't deny that we thought everything was going to be fantastic," says Steve Slater. "But we found that when we opened the doors again, nobody came in. Tramway had a stigma of being this big industrial building where strange things went on. Nobody wanted to come in during the day, no matter how hard we tried."

By the autumn of 2003, news was leaked to the press that Glasgow City Council had entered into secret talks with Scottish Ballet about converting Tramway into its new headquarters. The ballet company was being revitalised under Ashley Page, but their rehearsal space was crumbling. Tramway was struggling. The plan seemed like a neat solution to both problems. But no-one foresaw the backlash from Glasgow's visual art community, incensed at the news that Tramway 2 – one of the biggest exhibition spaces in Europe – could be closed and used to store sets. A Save the Tramway campaign was set up almost overnight, backed by the likes of Douglas Gordon and Christine Borland, both of whom had key early shows at Tramway. At length, agreement was reached on the current plan, an 11m new building for the ballet in an adjacent space.

Meanwhile, on a piece of derelict wasteground at the back of the building, a project was blossoming which would help Tramway rise from the ashes once again. Angus Farquhar's NVA – more commonly associated with big outdoor extravaganzas like The Path in Glen Lyon – announced that it was going to build a garden in Pollokshields. Hidden Gardens was a welcome green space in an urban area, but it was more than that. Creating it on philosophical principles drawn from different religions, and emphasising inter-faith dialogue, Farquhar had found a way to engage the multi-cultural community of Pollokshields. As the garden and cafe flourished, Tramway at last began to buzz.

"At that point, Tramway landed in Pollokshields," says Farquhar. "Now the building could be loved for different reasons, not just by cognoscenti who knew the work it produced. At a time when Tramway was having a particularly tough time, it brought in energy and impetus and support for the wider programme."

It established a template for Tramway as a base for different organisations: Hidden Gardens is run independently of the building, now Scottish Ballet and an independent local dance project will join the mix. "It's the different audiences coming into Tramway that make it such an amazing place," says visual art curator Lorraine Wilson.

"There are lots of different Tramways for lots of different people. The diversity is constantly reinventing the building."

Meanwhile, even if budgets are not what they were in the early 1990s, the lynchpin of Tramway is still in commissioning cutting-edge art and performance. Minty Donald's interventions celebrate this, projecting stop-motion photography from recent productions on the floor at the entrance, and letting visitors to hear and see what happens behind the scenes in an audio-visual work in Tramway 1.

Angus Farquhar applauds Tramway for bringing in innovative work from outside Scotland and inspiring the next generation of artists and theatre-makers. "Politics shift and language shifts," he says. "There has been entrenchment for and against Tramway, but it has battled through. Glasgow is still a big, tough, working-class city, there's always going to be a battle for innovative arts and that's healthy, it means that the work that's produced keeps its edge."

With a street-facing gallery space, improved project rooms and cafe and a bolstered staff team, the new Tramway will have a stronger infrastructure than it has ever had. Steve Slater is adamant that the focus is not on past triumphs, but on future innovation. Yet at the same time, it is difficult to imagine Tramway 2 flooded with water, as Brith Gof did in 1989. Is there a danger that Tramway will lose its edge?

"It's not the raw, edgy place where I waited out in the mud to watch The Gododdin," says Minty Donald. "I was talking to some younger people who see Tramway as very much part of the establishment. I'm interested in whether spaces inevitably become established. Does that mean they lose some of their edge, their rawness, and does that matter?"

&149 Glimmers in Limbo is at Tramway, 16 and 17 February; Trolleys in Tramway 2 until 2 March. The entrance area photographic projection runs to 29 June. Visit www.tramway.org or www.glimmersinlimbo.co.uk for details