Al Seed and Alan Richardson have been plotting a mischievous take-over.

The results will flourish all across Glasgow next week – so the watchword is: expect the unexpected. Actually, the watchword is Surge, the first ever festival of physical performance organised by Conflux, a body dedicated to the development of street arts. As they say on the programme, Surge is “on the stage, on the streets, on the water and even in the air”. And all of it comes with the intention of brightening up your day, refreshing your view of the Glasgow cityscape or teasing you into a new awareness of how street arts, circus and physical theatre skills can generate wonderfully vivid performances, often with an intelligently subversive edge to them.

Sitting in an office in the Briggait – where Conflux is newly based – Seed (the organisation’s artistic director) and Richardson (its project manager) wear their subversive inclinations with a smile. Both are heartily persuaded by their own past experiences – and more recently by the sell-out responses to a programme of beginners’ workshops and professional masterclasses – that Scotland is greedy for the kind of physical theatre that abounds elsewhere in Europe. Indeed, time was that any thought of large-scale street theatre work immediately led to discussions of where to source the company, with France and Spain providing a host of (admittedly exceptional) experts in the field.

That won’t be the case, however, when, on Friday week, Conflux Maximus marches down Buchanan Street, in an exuberant parade of local recruits led by our indefatigable home team of pranksters, Mischief La Bas. “We reckon,” says Seed, “that 133 Scottish artists are already scheduled to take part in Surge. And what’s particularly exciting in the long-term, is how those people interact off-stage, not just on-stage. The fact that they are all together, in the one place at the one time, will inevitably lead to all kinds of new collaborations and possibilities. So on that basis alone, Surge is doing a tremendous amount to develop physical theatre-making and all the related skills, in Scotland.”

Development – of street arts, circus skills and physical theatre – was the reason Conflux itself came into being in 2009. Seed knew, from his own career as a performer (he won a Bank of Scotland Herald Angel at the Edinburgh Fringe 2008 for The Fooligan) that there were pockets of activity all across the country. Students at Fife’s Adam Smith College were keen to have accreditation for what they were achieving in terms of physical theatre. Adults, as well as youngsters, were seeking out classes in circus skills. And more and more local authorities were bringing troupes of madcap players onto their streets at times of celebration, be it Hogmanay or summer festival.

In a way, Conflux joins up those dots. Supports the artists – and not just the emerging talents, but the established ones who are up for fresh challenges. Seed and Richardson are especially pleased that during Surge, Mischief La Bas’s Ian Smith and Alex Rigg (of Oceanallover) are working with young people relatively new to open-air performances. And as Richardson points out, this passing on of skills isn’t just about shrugging into a costume and getting out there.

“It’s about the preparation,” he says. “It’s about the technical side of things – how do you rig up any special effects without falling foul of ‘elf’n’safety’ or construct an amazing prawn costume, say, that won’t fall apart as soon as the wearer starts to move?”

When Richardson talks about his time in Liverpool, where he saw first-hand how street arts could help inject a mood of confidence and community spirit in individuals and in the city as a whole, you catch the serious intent that underpins his joking about staging alien invasions in George Square. (The latter is planned for the weekend of July 24 and 25, by the way – beguilingly entitled Used to be Slime).

While Surge is flooding the city centre with weird and wonderful mayhem – programmed as part of Glasgow’s Merchant City Festival –visitors to the Arches can experience a totally different side to what Conflux is championing: the one-to-one encounter as exemplified by The Venus Labyrinth. Nullo Facchini, artistic director of the Danish company Cantabile2, describes it as “human specific – because really, it turns out to be about you, the visitor. You are fundamental to the realisation of our ideas. It cannot be performed – it cannot even be rehearsed – without a spectator there. So here, in the Arches, I’m constantly knocking on office doors asking if anyone has five minutes to come and be in one or other of our rooms.”

As the softly-spoken Facchini sketches in some background – there are 14 rooms, each one with a lone female performer who represents specific parts of the brain – you quickly grasp why Seed was determined to bring this piece to Glasgow. It is an intense, and intensely intimate, counterpoint to the orchestrated brouhaha of the street actions even though it shares the same dynamic of immediacy. Facchini picks up on this when he talks about what is required of the women, several of whom are local performers. “Each of these actresses are working from a completely personal starting point. Whatever text they are speaking, whatever actions they are doing in that room – they are not playing ‘characters’. Everything has their truth in it. And for every meeting, for every person who enters that room, it has to be absolutely the ‘here and now’ moment. It really cannot be faked. And of course, it will be different for every spectator.”

He smiles, even after seven years – The Venus Labyrinth came into being in 2003 – Facchini is still intrigued and rewarded by the profound ways in which these one-to-one encounters affect not just the visitors but the performers. Siri Facchini Haff, his assistant and herself a performer in the piece, echoes his thoughts. “You never know who is coming through your door, or what they are bringing into the room,” she says. “So you are looking for a key, or a way to guide them into a meeting with you. It can be about secrets, about dreams... and you never know how people will respond.”

If only a handful of spectators can access the mysteries of the Labyrinth, crowds of folk can relish the various other delights that well up in Surge. “City centres can be such incredibly dreary, drab places,” observes Richardson. “So why not send something amusing or oddball in there. So as people can go home, or back to the office, and say ‘You’ll never guess – a guy in a large prawn costume has just wandered up to me...’ Next thing you know, some of them will be wanting to join in – and Conflux is here to make that happen too.”

Surge is at large in Glasgow from Monday 19 to Sunday 25 July. Full details of free and ticketed events at www.conflux.co.uk