Noh business like show business

'Writing about music," as Elvis Costello once told Musician magazine, "is like dancing about architecture: it's a really stupid thing to want to do." Martin Boroson, the director and founder of the Temenos Project, would probably disagree. After all, Equivalents, his company's contribution to the Dublin Fringe Festival, features a Butoh dancer dancing, a sound designer designing and a Japanese Noh master, well, nohing about the life and paintings of the American artist Georgia O'Keeffe.

"We brought all those elements into a close collaborative process . . . You could just as easily say it's a dance piece with lighting, or a light installation with a dancer, or . . ." Boroson is off, making phrases such as "transcultural performance" seem intelligible and, more to the point, intelligent.

A newcomer to the Fringe, the Temenos Project is a name that's probably unfamiliar to most, although it has been operating out of the Republic since the early 1990s, and last November even got the ultimate in official imprimaturs, when the Arts Council gave it multi-annual funding. Once you've heard it, though, it's a name you're unlikely to forget, hovering between that of a cold-war spy novel and an avant-garde conceptual-music outfit. But what does it mean?

"With the Temenos Project, I wanted to combine creative ideas with creative production methods. There's as much creativity in how you construct your business plan and apply for funding as there is in the work you do . . . \In alchemy, a temenos is a strong vessel where transformation can take place. For me, it's as much about creating the strong vessel as it is about the transformation. I was asking myself: 'What are the conditions needed to create excellence, to create something profound?' And, if you think about it, those are the questions of a producer as much as an artist."

The mixture of scholarship and business nous is typical of Boroson, a New Yorker with an atypical pedigree for a theatre director. The possessor of a BA in philosophy and an MBA from Yale School of Management, Boroson worked for many years as a therapist, and he has written an award-winning book called Becoming Me: A Story Of Creation.

The "conditions" he put together to create Equivalents show the hallmarks of his unconventional route into the arts. Everyone involved in the piece was brought to the deserts of New Mexico, to visit O'Keeffe's house, hold her paintbrushes and take part in workshops on topics such as Japanese calligraphy, Butoh dance moves and techniques that Boroson developed to encourage artists to find a deeper source of inspiration. "So much of art is just a recycling of the news or comes from the ego," he says.

Rather than introduce the lighting and sound designers once the piece was completed, they were integral from the early days in Santa Fe. "We said to the lighting people, 'OK, show us what's happening, improvise,' and they would improvise with light on the empty stage. We'd sit in the dark and listen to a piece of music, or say to the dancer: 'Let the light lead you.' At one point in the rehearsals, we had fabric operated by pulleys, which the set people adjusted as the music and dance was taking place. They were, in effect, performing the set."

This focus on process, rather than purely on performance, defines the Temenos Project and explains why the company has had such a low profile despite years of offstage activity.

The Temenos Project's other defining principle is a belief in crossing the boundaries between artistic disciplines, for which the company owes much to O'Keeffe, the American artist who has become totemic for Boroson and his company. "It all started in the late 1980s, when I noticed the resemblance between the actress Olwen Fouere, who is a great friend of mine, and Georgia O'Keeffe, and started to think about writing a play for Olwen about her life. I soon realised that whatever we could do theatrically, O'Keeffe would have hated, because she hated words, or, rather, she hated the way words were used to describe her life and her work."

Born in 1887, O'Keeffe has always been a charismatic figure in US arts, and her life, looks and sexuality were bound up with her work. The almost prurient interest in her can be attributed in part to a society ill-equipped to deal with a female artist who chose to live alone in the New Mexican desert, painting large-scale close-ups of flowers that ooze sexuality. It can also be attributed to the series of erotic portraits of O'Keeffe taken by her manager, the famed photographer Alfred Stieglitz, which were exhibited alongside her work early in her career.

"As she grew older, she hated interest in her life and tried to deflect it," says Boroson, "although she was a very skilful manipulator of it at the same time." Looking at ways to represent O'Keeffe, who shared his interest in Eastern philosophies and Zen art forms, led Boroson to explore such diverse disciplines as Noh theatre, black-ink painting and Butoh dance.

"I basically made the movement into having tools other than words, tools such as bodies, colour, sound, light and architecture," says Boroson. "But it wasn't just about finding the right art forms; it was about finding the right people, who were interested in crossing disciplines and bridging worlds other than their own."

His search took two years and involved such ploys as getting a list of every Japanese artist living in Britain and group-mailing them (one replied), until, finally, a group of 17 artists from five countries met for a week-long conference in Wicklow, in 1997.

"They ranged in age from 30 to 60, from highly decorated established artists from Japan to people who hadn't done much work at all. There were some pretty intense dynamics."

Yet out of that came a studio work, performed at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1999, and, following the intense work in New Mexico, Equivalents.

The term the Temenos Project has settled on to describe the work is "stage paintings", with each of Equivalents' two sections inspired by an O'Keeffe work. The first, The Winter Road, is structured as a narrative piece, but one based on the abstract, Noh way of telling a story. "In her best work, O'Keeffe worked on the border of abstraction and realism . . . We're playing with that boundary."

Like O'Keeffe's simple black ribbon of paint in The Winter Road, Akira Matsui, a Noh master, will move slowly across the white box that the Temenos Project will create within the Black Box theatre of Project arts centre, in Dublin. Music: Pink and Blue, No 1 is a 25-minute "collaboration of light, sound and music" that shows off the talents of Butoh dancer Naomi Mutoh, sound designer Trevor Knight and lighting designer Jane Cox, a Dubliner working in New York.

The Temenos Project has been asked to bring Equivalents to the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, as well as to Santa Fe and Japan, but Boroson's attention is also focused on other Irish projects.

There are the training programmes scheduled for early next year, which will bring international artists such as Mirka Yemendzakis, the Greek theatre director, and Angela de Castro, the Brazilian clown, to Ireland for ongoing workshops. There are also the plans for a Temenos Project website, which will serve as an international noticeboard for, say, "a visual artist in Cambodia with an interest in African shamanism who wants to contact an Irish sean-n≤s singer", as well as a series of artists' retreats.

But, most of all, Boroson is working on making the experience of art more meaningful for Irish audiences. How does he propose to do that? "Well," he ponders, "we could take the whole audience away for the weekend." You have been warned.

Equivalents: Stage Paintings From The World Of Georgia O'Keeffe is part of Dublin Fringe Festival; it is at Project from October 12th to 20th (previews on October 10th and 11th). The festival runs from September 24th to October 13th. Bookings at 01-6773850 or see www.fringefest.com