'As a Matter of Fact' is a physical reaction to the tyranny of our data-addicted, time-obsessed techno-society, writes Christine Madden

Do you ever feel as though life in the 21st century is a treadmill speeding up under your feet, as though you're bombarded with information, as though the pace of your days and weeks and months goes faster and faster and faster and fasteruntileverythingisablur?

As a matter of fact, choreographers Robert Connor and Loretta Yurick, the artistic directors of Dance Theatre of Ireland (DTI), feel much the same. They've put their reading and experience of our data-addicted, time-obsessed techno-society into their latest work, As a Matter of Fact, which premieres tomorrow.

This piece could well be Connor and Yurick's biggest challenge to date. It harks back to work they had done up to 1993, when they made a conscious decision not to use text in their compositions, and pulls together ideas and sentiments on the gasping race of daily existence, illustrated not only with dance but also with text, music and video backdrops.

For this work, "the basic starting-point was words," says Yurick.

"Words are more directly accessible," agrees Connor. "We both write a lot, read a lot. Years ago, we did use words, as voice-over or speaking elements."

What brought them back to verbal language was their reading of work as diverse as Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, Barbara Kingsolver's volume of essays on the US post-9/11, Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, books on food processing and production and species extinction - and the soundbites we're constantly bombarded with: jingles, advertising slogans, pithy recommendations for survival.

They then enlisted writer Joe O'Byrne - who recently directed The Woman Who Walked Into Doors and De Profundis - as partner in rhyme with Yurick.

"It kicked off with Joe," recounts Yurick. "We gave him a list of categories: statistics, quality of life, religion, population, food, species extinction, facts about the body and time. He then came back to us with a script that was this thick. We used about 2 per cent in the end."

O'Byrne had collaborated with DTI in the past; this time, however, he had joined up to enhance the company's work, instead of the other way round as, for example, in his 1991 production, The Train.

"It's a very different experience from normal theatre, which operates from a fixed text - particularly Irish theatre, which is more text-based than its European counterparts," says O'Byrne. "It's easy to cross the line where there is too much text, and it becomes an intrusion. A lot of what I wrote got cut out and, as a writer, you feel like 'Oh, no, where's my text gone?' But it's still a part of the silent texture of the piece."

Connor and Yurick are, nevertheless, dancers and choreographers, and the words used must ultimately serve the visual impact of movement. The paring away of excess words demonstrates their concern with the over-saturation of verbal expression.

"In the modern age, we're bombarded with modes of communication," says Connor. "It can have the contrary effect of blocking our ability to communicate, blocking out instinctive languages."

They illustrate their point with an element used in their piece: the work of Dr Paul Ekman and his "facial action coding system".

"It's a coding system for every muscle group in the face" - different parts of Connor's physiognomy begin to shift; I'd never seen anyone dance so effectively with eyebrows, cheeks and the corners of the mouth - "like this. Or like this."

Using this system, one can interpret the actual message being conveyed, rather than what the speaker actually wishes you to know (Ekman's website is apparently a great favourite with criminologists).

A segment of As a Matter of Fact plays with these languages working at cross- purposes: with a text voiced over, big faces "speak" their truth, as the dancers in front wield theirs.

The concept of "truth" frequently rears its unpopular head in contemplation of this piece: what is its relationship to "fact"? Is it the scattered bits of data that pelt us every minute of the day? One of the texts states, "It is common today for a modern person to spend nearly an hour a day reading newspapers . . . \ person also spends time reading magazines, books, signs, billboards, recipes, instructions, labels on cans. Surrounded by print, he consumes between 10,000 and 20,000 edited words per day."

In a unique effort, Connor and Yurick have translated and streamlined this into their language.

"This piece is factually based and pointed at trends of contemporary living," says Connor. "We've created imagery of response to fact - created movement textures that carry the feeling of the area of the topic we're talking about."

Yurick jumps in. "We're dancers. We like to work with people's bodies. For this, all our skills as choreographers were called into play: what are the starting-points to create movement?"

These are manifold. One solo, for example, arose from 'She', a poem written by O'Byrne. Brought into development between Connor and Yurick and the dancer, it morphed into a woman looking at herself as reflected in the distorted mirror of a spoon. Musician Dara O'Brien, who will provide live accompaniment to the performances, composed a piece to go with it: Eastern Lullaby.

Yet another element of this production comes from the Swiss-based graphic video company, Tenteki. Connor and Yurick had seen the work of this partnership of Mischa Eberli and Tobias Peier at the CYNET Art media art festival in Dresden and approached them about working together on the production.

Having previously worked on four dance projects, Eberli and Peier feel comfortable weaving their video work into the mesh of media in DTI's production.

"Everybody brings their own experience into it," says Peier. "It's not an installation, it's a dance, and everything else is intended to enhance it."

They composed their video component by filming the dancers as though through CCTV. Their software then recognises the movement as changes in the light. What happens next comes down to Eberli and Peier's artistic eye. Their final version won't be ready until shortly before the performance, so the element of risk, with the video - hopefully - fitting blindly yet seamlessly into the other elements, adds a certain frisson to the mix.

"It's only been a fragment up to now. That makes it a bit exciting as well - you can see if something new will develop," says Peier.

He was astonished, though, at the level of precision Connor and Yurick aimed for. "I was quite amazed how precise they wanted it. It's pretty complicated with the texts, getting it all to fit together, and it requires exact timing."

Of course, dance happens in the immediate here and now, and the timing problems in getting everything to snap together at the right moment emphasises another aspect of the piece.

"The wonderful thing about our art," says Yurick, "is that it's temporal, what you are right now."

So dance is perfectly suited to communicating temporality, and what Connor calls the "time epidemic". "Time starvation is a feature of this piece," he says.

"The faster we can do things, the more we take on what to do," agrees Yurick. "We don't actually have more time, we just take on more."

"Computers," interjects Connor - you can tell the two partners are used to dancing together, with words instead of limbs crossing over and around each other - "they save time, but have they shortened the working week?"

A lot has come together for Connor and Yurick in this production and, although As a Matter of Fact is "factually based", it seems to have become perhaps their most passionate work.

"We completed the first draft of this piece five to six weeks after starting," confides Yurick. "And I said: 'Oh God, Robert, this is probably the most personal piece we've ever done'."

And in illustration of the difference between fact and truth, Connor and Yurick's instinct and intuition guided them through the creative process. When they liaised with O'Brien after his initial period of composition, he played his drafts for them.

"And the first thing he played," recalls Yurick, "was this piece, The Wave, and we knew instantly that that was the end of the piece. He then lost it over the next few months, but luckily he found it again, so it's in.

"As much as we can find things, we can lose them. Our job as choreographers is to help people find things they sometimes lose."

As a Matter of Fact opens tomorrow at the Pavilion Theatre, DúLaoghaire (tel: 01-2312929), then goes on tour until December 1st.