For 16 days this fall, Pittsburgh's art scene will take on an edgy global look with the return of the Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts.

Andy Warhol's black-and-white film shorts will be put to music at the Byham theater, actors in a Spanish theater group will perform before individual audience members in a labyrinth of rooms and a Slovenia dance group will set Shakespeare's classic love story to music by Radiohead, to name a few of the performances that will run from Oct. 10-25.

The festival -- last here in 2004 -- is back as part of the city's 250th anniversary celebration. It's presented by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust in collaboration with The Andy Warhol Museum.

This year's festival presents a broad spectrum with music, performance pieces, dance and visual arts to be held in a variety of locations -- from conventional theater spaces to warehouses, museums and even a former armory.

A requirement for Festival of Firsts works is that they must be new creations, or never seen before in the United States.

"The works celebrate the intersection of art, theater dance, music and movement -- and they blur the lines between art forms" to give audiences a unique performance experience, says Paul Organisak, Festival of Firsts curator and vice president of programming for the Cultural Trust.

"A lot of this work doesn't fit neatly into categories," says Ben Harrison, associate Festival of Firsts curator and associate curator of performances at the Warhol. The selected works are "a broad sample of new international performance work that shares common threads of being intimate, awkward and immersive, and happening in atypical environments as well as theaters and traditional performance spaces."

The Andy Warhol Museum and the Cultural Trust will present a world premiere using short films by Warhol, set to music by indie rockers Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips.

Between 1963 and 1966, Warhol filmed short black-and-white screen tests of visitors to his factory studio in New York. Some were celebrities, others were unknown. Each screen test is projected in slow motion, magnifying every move and gesture.

The films are part of the Warhol collection, and have rarely been seen outside of a gallery setting.

For "13 Most Beautiful ... Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests," Wareham is selecting 13 of the screen tests, and composing short pieces for each.

The films will be projected on a large screen at the Byham and the music will be performed live (Oct. 24-25 at 8 p.m., Byham Theater).

Barcelona-based Teatro de los Sentidos (Theatre of the Senses) pushes the conventional limits of stage and theater, performer and audience with the performance piece "The Echo of the Shadow." Each audience member experiences the performance alone, advancing through a labyrinth and encountering different rooms with actors. Because of the nature of the piece, it will be limited to 50 audience members a day over 10 days of performances. This is an exclusive U.S. premiere (Oct. 15-19, 21-25 at the Ellis Armory on Penn Avenue across from the former Reizenstein Middle School).

London artist Peter Reder creates site-specific performance/guided tours tailored to different sites in different cities. Here, he'll use the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, taking visitors through areas like the dinosaur and insect collections, and drawing on the interest in the ongoing Carnegie International exhibition at the art museum.

Participants shouldn't expect a conventional tourist experience. Reder's creations use the ambience of their settings as a springboard for a journey interwoven with his unique storyweaving and musings. Reder's "Guided Tour" is presented as part of the Warhol's Off the Wall series (Oct. 11-14 at the Carnegie art and natural history museums, although dates are subject to change).

Ballet Maribor, a dance company from Slovenia, will present "Radio and Juliet." Choreographer Edward Clug's spare, minimalist interpretation of Shakespeare's classic love story is set to music by the band Radiohead and performed by one female and six male dancers.

The Ballet Maribor performance is also the opening of the Pittsburgh Dance Council's 2008-2009 season. (Oct. 10 at 7 p.m. and Oct. 11 at 8 p.m. at the Byham Theater).

Alto sax player Rudresh Mahanthappa is an Indian-American musician who taps into both American and Indian musical traditions in his compositions. In "Samdhi: Diasporic Connections," his new composition making its world premiere here, he blends these traditions with electronic audio processing and drumming (Oct. 10 and 11 at 9 p.m. the New Hazlett Theater, North Side).

Kassys, an Amsterdam-based theater group, will present the U.S. premiere of "LIGA." This performance piece opens with a video and then moves back in time, with events unfolding in a kind of live flashback (Oct. 16-18 at 8 p.m. at the New Hazlett Theater).

Norwegian performance company Jo Stromgren Kompani presents an exclusive U.S. premiere. "The Department" blends theater, dance, live music and nonsense language for an absurdist take on an imaginary government office (Oct. 23-24 at the new Hazlett Theater at 8 p.m.).

The festival also will incorporate the visual arts with Wood Street Galleries' presentation of "Gravity of Light," the first public viewing of a new exhibit by New York artists Doug and Mike Starn. It will incorporate a carbon arc lamp created by the artists and will have its first showing here at a Strip District warehouse (Oct. 10-30, location to be announced).

It's not exactly a first, but a popular city attraction is coming back -- A Festival of Lights, which will be switched on during the festival's opening night.

In last year's Festival of Lights, Downtown buildings were illuminated with light paintings projected on the sides of buildings. This year, Pittsburgh Celebrates 250: A Festival of Lights will light up the heart of the Cultural District, with a new light painting on the Century Building next to Katz Plaza.

Tickets will range from $20 and $25 for individual performances and will go on sale in August.