Women – strong women, charismatic women, creative women – are the underlying link between the three works in Scottish Ballet’s forthcoming autumn bill.

In Motion of Displacement, a company commission that marks the UK debut of New York choreographer Bryan Arias, the woman he cites as an inspiration is his own mother.

“My Mom left El Salvador to come to the States when she was just 16,” says Arias. “She met my Dad and went with him to Puerto Rico, where I was born. But then, when I was about eight, she came back to New York. A single parent with me and my brother, because she wanted us to have better opportunities, better education. She had all these stories she would tell us, about the different places. But her journey always took her into some unknown.”

It’s the emotional as well as the physical effect of those unknowns – the stranger who may or may not be kind, the new country that doesn’t feel like home and maybe never will – that Arias explores in this new piece. Referring back to his mother’s experiences as she crossed countries and cultures, he talks about a “loss of innocence” but then expands on that, adding: “I also think of loss of innocence as losing the child within oneself, and of losing the ability to take risks. Shrinking. I think you have to be prepared to take risks – maybe fail – but that becomes an experience that defines who you are. This is where my mom came from – and it has led to me having this amazing life. Being here, now.”

It was only after some three weeks of working with Scottish Ballet’s dancers that Arias shared his family history with them, and spoke of how his mother’s stories of her journey were a key factor in his ideas for Motion of Displacement. He laughs at how much talking and moving had taken place in the studio before this disclosure, but by closely observing the conversational exchanges and physical interactions between the dancers, Arias was figuring out how best he could free up their own creativity, channel their memories and attitudes into movement that would really express what was honestly felt.

“If you walk in and say on day one ‘this is what it’s all about’ – it’ll seep away over time. Three weeks into the creation, it’ll have become a routine. A job. This way – the anxieties of facing something new will have gone, the dancers will know me better and we can have those open conversations about vulnerability, and how it speaks from the chest. Right from the heart, here.” He smiles as he puts the words into a gesture but this is how Arias thinks, feels and choreographs. Motion of Displacement won’t be a linear narrative, but it will tell recognisable stories of solitary challenges or shared encounters: personal experiences will reach out beyond the particular to the general as movements meet music by Bach and John Adams.

Though the movement comes primarily from an abstract/contemporary/minimalist context, there is a brief sequence that uses pointe-work “because of the music, and a moment in Adams’s Shaker Loops that I feel is a place of transition,” says Arias. Transitions are intrinsic to his concept of how, where and when connections happen - or indeed fail. “There’s a point where the dynamic of the music seems to hover in what seems an angelic place, or maybe a place of memory, of melancholy – and pointe-work just fitted that image. There’s balance, but also risk on pointe – and it really alters the line of the legs, the body, with another visual texture. But only for a short time. Like every life journey, it moves on...”

Arias smiles, pauses, then says. “My mother left her home at sixteen, made her journey to California for love – and I think this, and what followed, have been there subconsciously for me throughout this creation. It is really full of her story.”

Strictly speaking, Elsa Canasta is a figment of Javier de Frutos’s vividly mischievous imagination, but there was an Elsa who influenced the title and some of his thought processes. The legendary American hostess Elsa Maxwell (1883 – 1963) would surely have adored the silvery sweep of staircase that is central to de Frutos’s action – just the place for assignations of a fleetingly flirtatious kind – and moreover she was a lifelong friend of Cole Porter whose music is sung live, on-stage throughout. When Rambert originally staged the piece in 2003, they had a chanteuse whom we assumed might be Elsa, owner of the nightclub whose fire exit leads thrill-seekers out onto that stairway to liberty-taking. Now, a dozen years later de Frutos has re-visited and expanded the piece into a work that is now shaped around Scottish Ballet.

“It was important to me that they had ownership of it,” he says, adding roguishly “actually I couldn’t remember the steps – Hope could!” He’s referring to the company’s rehearsal director, Hope Muir, who was in that Rambert production and is now at his side in Tramway’s main studio.

Given that many of the steps involve brinkmanship dives from staircase heights into waiting arms below, it’s little wonder Muir remembers them. Even so, de Frutos isn’t interested in re-treading the past.

“I don’t franchise my work out. And I’m not going to sit there without getting involved – it would be like watching my own eulogy. I do know what I want to see coming out of it, so I’ve kept the DNA – but said let’s do this baby differently. I was about to turn 40 when I did it with Rambert, I’m 52 now and I know more of my craft – I’ve done a lot of theatre since.”

Indeed he has.The Caracas-born choreographer has worked on film, in musicals – he won the prestigious Olivier Award for 'Best Theatre Choreographer' in February 2007 for the West End production of Cabaret – and he was the go-to creative visionary the Pet Shop Boys called on when they wanted to stage The Most Incredible Thing (2011). The word “craft” hardly encompasses the range and flair that is de Frutos in full flight. He decided he wanted to take Elsa Canasta further. He changed the gender of the singer, bringing in Nick Holder – a kind of cross between Cole Porter and de Frutos on-stage – and he’s “brought it closer to the sexual politics that were only touched on before.” He jokes that “whatever happens in the club, stays in the club – but we don’t see inside the club. We see what goes on, on those stairs!” Canasta, by the way, is a card game – de Frutos has some very sexy tricks up his sleeve.

Providing the curtain-raiser in Scottish Ballet’s autumn programme is Sophie Laplane, a company member since 2004 and one of those rare beings: a female choreographer. Her new piece, Maze, follows on from a series of short works that crackle with relationship tensions. Both Puzzle and Oxymore were duets, this new work features a quartet who – as the title, Maze, suggests – are willing to get lost, or maybe misled, in order to find out more about themselves by embracing risk. Bryan Arias’s mother and Elsa would join Sophie Laplane in saying “go for it!”

Scottish Ballet’s autumn programme opens at Theatre Royal, Glasgow, Thursday September 24 to Saturday September 26. It then tours to Edinburgh, Inverness and Aberdeen.

www.scottishballet.co.uk