The world's most famous arts festival is to have its first major launch in Glasgow.

The Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) will have a formal Glasgow launch for the first time next week at the city's Tramway venue, in tandem with Scottish Ballet.

Jonathan Mills, artistic director of the EIF, said the Glasgow launch is particularly important to show the festival is throwing its weight behind the forthcoming Commonwealth Games in 2014.

Last year the EIF recorded a banner year for the event with a 9% rise in ticket sales with £2.83 million taken at the box office.

Audiences from Glasgow have grown over the past six years – from 5% of the audience in 2007 to 11% last year.

Next week's launch will be the first large-scale celebration of the EIF in Glasgow in the week the programme is unveiled.

The event has been designed to demonstrate the nationwide appeal of the festival, and the contribution of many artists from Glasgow.

Mr Mills said: "We are delighted to be working with Scottish Ballet to host a Glasgow launch celebration on Thursday evening.

"There is much to celebrate between Glasgow and Edinburgh; Scottish Ballet's remarkable contribution to 2013, that of our many artists based on the west coast, and the opportunities around the two cities working together to best effect in 2014.

"Itis an opportunity to demonstrate the festival is keen to encourage relationships and audiences with those based in Glasgow and surrounds.'

Mr Mills, also said the nation's troubled arts funding body, Creative Scotland, needs to be more modest in its ambitions and less grandiose.

He spoke out about the past year of crisis and controversy at Creative Scotland – the national arts funding body – that led to the departure of chief executive Andrew Dixon and senior director Venu Dhupa.

The body, which distributes £80m in Government and National Lottery funds a year, is currently looking for a new chief executive.

His comments came on the day Creative Scotland unveiled its "action plan for change", which includes new artist bursaries and an annual conference.

He said: "If I would have one observation to make, I believe the people who were there were genuine, and they were well meaning.

"But I think, when you are given the opportunity to start something new, you need to take care of the existing obligations, not just throw everything away, not that I am saying they did that.

"Where government fails, or where some of these efforts fail, is where they become a little too grandiose, rather than embedding, in a deeper sense, incremental change that will then lead on to more profound change.

"It is a moment to be more modest, is what I am saying.

"More modest in [their] expectations and more modest in terms of its relationships to the rest of the sector. That's what I would be advocating."

Several arts organisations funded by Creative Scotland are in this year's challenging EIF programme.

Mr Mills added: "It did not directly affect the festival, but anything that affects the cultural sector in the way that a lack of stability and uncertainty in the administrative arrangements of an agency as important as Creative Scotland, will if not immediately, it will eventually, affect the way we are able to work with colleagues and professional artists in Scotland.

"I would say there is a clear demonstration of the importance we attach to companies other than national companies to the presence this year of [two organisations] in the programme, that is not an accident, but that was not a sociological decision, that was an artistic one. We didn't do it to make a point."