Picture the scene. The artistic directors of a reputable theatre company bring their new show to the Galway Arts Festival. It's a sophisticated affair, incorporating image, narrative, light and movement, but no sooner have they arrived at the Black Box studio to prepare for opening night than they're rooting around the stage like forensics at the scene of a crime, scouring floorboards, sweeping out corners, brush and pan in hand. The stage crew look on bemused; they don't take it personally.

Steve Tiplady and Sally Brown, directors of the UK-based Indefinite Articles, are simply stocking up on their most indispensable artistic material: dust. They'll play with it just as their mothers always warned them not to; they'll smear it over the glass plates of overhead projectors, draw through it with fingers and thumbs. From it they'll produce a sequence of pictures and words to be cast on to a screen on stage for their audience to decipher. What will unfold, says Tiplady, is a meditation on a journey far away from home. This is Dust - A Shadow Odyssey, the result of a collaboration between a number of artists from the fields of puppetry, painting and playwriting.

Delicate slivers of light, freed from beneath a layer of dust, are reflected on screen, and quickly disappear; these are the scenes of a drama which challenges its audience to distinguish the tangible from the ethereal, the real from the remembered and the dreamed. Dust draws on a tradition as old as Plato's cave - shadow puppetry - but Tiplady himself admits to being stumped when it comes to questions of definition. "It's hard to pin down. It's kind of shadow work in negative. You're drawing in light, drawing images, and having two machines on at the same time, and having two sets of images that are animated . . . it's shadow-related, but it's not like any shadow work I've done before." However, Dust is similar to the kind of work he has done before in that it is fuelled by an inventive capacity to make the most of available resources.

Early in his career, Tiplady tired of the limitations of conventional puppetry. "I found I was more interested in objects," he explains, "in the power that objects had, in teasing out the stories that were concealed within them. The stories can be to do with what these objects actually do, or with their metaphorical resources. It was just my kind of thing." Since then he has worked with several companies to develop a school of object theatre in Britain.

For decades, this has been a respected genre in Europe, but closer to home it is still regarded largely as entertainment for children. Tiplady has devised a number of children's shows, including Pinnochio, in which he gave carpenters' tools the power of speech, and The Adventures of Theseus, which tells an epic tale using chiefly a piece of string.

But it is his work for adult audiences which has really impressed with its innovation and sheer ingenuity. While the parts of his own body became the court of Elsinore and the characters of Hamlet, Improbable Theatre's 70 Hill Lane saw Tiplady masterfully piece together a story of childhood and the supernatural . . . with sellotape.

70 Hill Lane won him such acclaim from contemporaries that Tiplady found himself in the position of being able to request for Dust the participation of a major artist: Joan Baixas, the Catalan painter and director who collaborated with Joan Mir≤ on the 1978 piece for theatre Mori el Merma, an explosive satire on Francoism. Indeed, it's not difficult to see why Baixas might have been drawn to Dust, since his own most recent show pivoted on a similar idea of sifting through the rubble of human presence to find an artistic form. Inspired by a visit to Sarajevo, Terra Prenyada (Pregnant Earth) explores themes of grief and vulnerability using ashes gathered from the ruins of the city's library.

The resemblance to Dust, however, is purely coincidental, according to Tiplady. "His work, his visual language, is an inspiration to us, but not that work, in that way," he insists. While Baixas' piece evolved on stage to a pattern formulated in advance, the ethos of Dust, he says, favours a more spontaneous generation of meaning in the here-and-now. "The idea of using dust, for us, is essentially playing around with it," he explains. "Sally and I discovered this technique of drawing in the dust on overhead projectors by accident, and we wanted to find a way of using it in a story-telling capacity. We thought of it, I think, even before Joan, and we had been dying to try it."

Improvised image, inverted shadows: it certainly sounds like an abstract form of theatre. But for Brown and Tiplady, who have been a couple for some years, and comprise two-thirds of the show's performance team, Dust is an intensely personal venture. Whilst touring the US and the Far East with 70 Hill Lane, a homesick Tiplady found solace in the story of Odysseus, wandering from island to island and missing his distant Penelope. On returning home to develop the idea of Dust, he asked Keith Bambury, with whom he had worked on Hamlet, to come up with a modern re-telling of Homer's epic which could serve as the backbone of the show.

The words of Bambury's adaptation interweave on stage with Tiplady's unscripted narration of his own experience of exile and return. "It's about the past and the present, about connecting the two," he explains, "so you've got me, the puppeteer, talking about my journeying away from home and longing to get back, and you have the story of Odysseus running parallel."

Doesn't he have qualms about presenting such frankly autobiographical experience as theatre, about presenting Brown on stage as his girlfriend as well as his co-artist? Not at all. Rather, he maintains, this blend of the personal and the professional facilitates a deeper exploration of how it is that art emerges from the everyday, how those mythical echoes sound through ordinary lives. "I wanted to explore my reasons for doing the show. I wanted to explore the idea of the personal experience interweaving with epic, the resonances between the two, and how they link together. And yet how they are totally dissociated from one another."

The on-stage interplay of past and present, of dust and living bodies bears disturbing connotations; had Tiplady and Brown decided to go with their original choice of medium, talcum powder, would they have sacrificed these undertones of mortality, transience, fragility? Tiplady thinks so; "it would just have reminded people of their bathrooms". Yet neither does he want to suggest Dust is a drama of depressing implications. "I hope it's very moving; while there is death, there is no intended morbidity. The death just shows up the differences between the past and the present. It questions the reverence with which we treat old texts, while actually, how very brutal they are . . . and how, from them, we develop our own stories."

He concedes also that there is the risk of abstraction; if audiences sometimes find it difficult to relate to a flesh-and-blood actor, where will they be left by the flicker of shadows on a wall? "I don't think we have fallen into that trap," he says. "Abstract work can be very moving, very strong, but it's not what I want to do with this show. I believe in communicating with an audience, not confusing them. I want it to be accessible."

So while the wisdom of Joan Baixas proved crucial in shaping this project, neither were the artists afraid to depart from the principles of his work, which tends to impact chiefly at the visual level. Dust fulfills Tiplady's belief in the importance of narrative in forging a connection with an audience. Yet he believes, too, in rousing an audience to draw upon their own resources, to make the effort to construct the evolving story. "It's not given to them on a plate, they have to do a little bit of work," he says, adding that children are always more willing than adults on this score.

"Children will do an enormous amount, and I think it's a shame that people don't force them to work more, to leave a few gaps." In Dust, it is the gaps which tell the tale, the fissures in the surface which point towards narrative. For Tiplady, it is the culmination of a desire to scale down to the essence of artistic expression, to reach the bedrock of the stage.

"There's something of the purity of Baixas' forms, his drawings, that we've held to," he explains. "With the possibilities of objects, we've pushed further and further . . . With Dust we push that even further. Pushing for a purer, purer theatre."

Dust opens at Galway Arts Festival tomorrow and runs until Sunday. Black Box Studio, 9 p.m. Booking on 091-566577