All aboard for the train dance

The Arts: A collaboration at Dublin's Project is using film and dance to create a journey where the audience can get on and off as they wish, writes Arminta Wallace.

I met a man from Kazakhstan at Heuston Station once; helped him, in some small way, to sort out his ticket. I can't remember where he was going, but I do remember being gripped by the idea that he might have come all the way to Ireland from Kazakhstan on the train, and feeling slightly dizzy as the vast steppes of central Asia flowed, for a split second, into the early-morning chill of the ticket office.

There's something comfortingly ordinary, yet achingly whimsical, about train journeys and railway stations: think of Thomas the Tank Engine, John Betjeman's poetry, all those TV documentaries about great railway journeys of the world. Time seems to behave differently around trains. It stretches, slows, marches along to that chugetty-chug rhythm. Sometimes it stops altogether - mostly when you're peering down the platform, willing that longed-for black dot to appear on the horizon.

This is the imaginative space which dancer and choreographer Mary Nunan and film-maker James Kelly explore in their new piece, Return Journey, at Project Cube. It's an unusual work in many ways. For one thing, performances begin at noon every day and run until 8pm. For another, audiences are welcome to drop in for a while, stay, leave, or go and have a cup of coffee and come back for another while - and it's free, so people can drop in as many times as they like.

"It's a very simple, playful idea," says Nunan. "Art often seems to be about escaping into some other world, but this is about a world most people are familiar with. If you spend any time around a train station at all, you become aware of the theme of constant departure and constant return. When you're going anywhere, you either have something pulling you to wherever you're going, or you have a memory of something that happened in the past dragging you back. That's what coming and going is, often.

"We're trying to bring those two forces together, to shrink them in a way - because when they come together, something happens. The body . . . [she moves her head and arms in a fluid ripple] kind of softens."

FOR THE AUDIENCE, the experience will, Nunan hopes, be disarmingly simple, yet immensely energising. The adventure starts at the door of the Project Cube. Before you step in, you don't know exactly what's going on inside. There will be three large screens fixed to the wall facing you, but there will also be two live dancers circling the periphery of the space - and they could be anywhere, perhaps right in front of you, so that your entry itself turns, as Nunan puts it, into "one of those skipping games where you wait for the rope to come down so that you can jump in".

Once inside, you'll find yourself literally in the centre of things; cocooned inside a gentle, three-dimensional sensory experience which combines sight, in the form of the three films continually unfolding on the screens; sound, in the form of a score by sound and visual artist Michael McLoughlin; and, of course, the tactile presence of the dancers, turning and gesturing "like urban dervishes".

"When we originally proposed the idea to Willie White here at the Project, we said we wanted to explore dancing, body, space and the moving image," says Nunan.

That was two years ago. Now, with the help of seed-funding from Project and a commission from the Arts Council, the piece will run at Project Cube until March 1st.

As a dialogue between artists, it has, she and Kelly agree, worked extremely well. There were no fights or tantrums or artistic disagreements. Indeed, they seem as comfortable in each other's company as two friends of long standing. But how did their two artistic worlds connect?

"What I like to explore in the crossover between film and dance has to do with space," says Kelly. "Very often, dance has a limited space. The dancer comes on stage or goes off stage, but there's not a whole lot more you can do. Film gave us the freedom to extend that space towards infinity."

He produces a laptop and three CDs, and feeds a disc into the slot. Even on the small screen, the images are startling, beautiful, humorous. A girl on a railway platform. She opens her suitcase. Pieces of clothing fly upwards in slow-motion. Her head turns. In another shot, she opens her hands to reveal a blossoming of red petals - actually, says Kelly, pieces of crepe paper.

There are shots of trains: an amphibian train, its spine supple and green; a silver train, rippling from one side of the screen to the other. And there's the item which, for most people, is instantly evocative of dance and dancing - a red ballet shoe. There are certain cleverly edited links between the three films, Kelly explains, but when they're running on a continuous loop for eight hours at a time, they'll offer an almost infinite number of juxtapositions and surprises.

"At the back of my head, I suppose, I had the idea of the traditional triptych," he says.

The piece was initially inspired by the black-and-white chequerboard pattern of the tiles on the floor of Colbert train station in Limerick, where Nunan has lived and worked - formerly as artistic director of Daghdha Dance Company, now as an independent artist - for many years. The black-and-white pattern is echoed in the on-screen images, which emerge from and fade into black or white, and the check coats which the dancers will continuously be putting on and taking off, giving cohesion to the disparate parts of the work.

Colbert Station, however, is also one of the undisputed stars of the show. Its architecture - from the glass tiles of the enclosing roof to the tracks which disappear into infinity - was the starting-point for Return Journey, and both artists spent many hours there while the films were being made.

"The dancer suffered for her art," says Kelly, as we watch her explore the tiled floor of the station with her fingers. "Her hands used to get totally black. In fact, we were all quite dieselly by the end of the filming. There was a lot of sitting around - and often, when the engines are running, the whole place just fills with diesel fumes. I felt I was coughing diesel out a week later."

"As opposed," Nunan adds, quick as a flash, "to sucking diesel."

But, she continues, the folks from Iarnród Éireann were really good about giving permission for the piece to be filmed - and really helpful while filming was going on. They did get into trouble over one shot in which the dancer walks away down the platform towards the horizon. "You're not supposed to go off the end, so they were a bit cross," Nunan says with a smile.

FOR THE THREEdancers, however - Nunan herself, Mary Wycherley and Inma Pavon - this particular journey is far from over. For the duration of Return Journeyat the Project, they'll be in action for a minimum of five hours a day, working in two-hours-on, one-hour-off shifts. "And some days," adds Nunan, "we'll have to do six hours."

She seems remarkably sanguine about the physical demands of this marathon train dance. The mental attitude of the dancers, she says, will be far more important. "In my experience, to keep this kind of focus on very simple, very repetitive movements, and to maintain it, requires an awful lot of discipline. You have to find a stillness in order to maintain a constant turning. I wonder whether that will become more available to us as time goes on, and therefore more available to an audience as well."

One thing the audience definitely won't get, though, is an explanation. Who is this woman? Where is she going? What's with the shoe? Return Journeyallows the audience members to decide for themselves - even, in effect, to choose their own narrative by deciding which screen to watch, or which dancer, and in what order. There are suggestions - ghosts - of narratives from both films and dancers. But, Nunan stresses, "no one part is meant to explain the other - they just sit like layers, one on another". As enigmatic, in its own way, as an announcement from Iarnród Éireann. But a lot more enjoyable.

•Return Journey is at Project Cube until Mar 1.