There are many ways to pick a fight with Willie White, artistic director of Project arts centre, in Dublin. They range from the sneakily provocative ("I quite enjoyed that play") via the more directly confrontational ("The avant-garde is for snivelling adolescents") to the less obviously inflammatory ("Hello, Willie").
But when the dependably pugilistic White says he believes "the play structure is a little bit redundant now", well, them's fighting words.
Admittedly, this writer has antagonised White by repeating another theatre executive's wearily dismissive views of "live art", a bracingly unorthodox but woefully misunderstood area of performance that embraces, as Live Art Magazine puts it, "a broad range of works and artists that are variously hybrid, interdisciplinary and collaborative, fundamentally connected by their tendency to blur, subvert, transgress and critique traditional art form and discipline boundaries".
What has that got to do with Project's British Council-sponsored About Time festival, you may ask. "We've actually taken great care not to call it a live-art festival," says White. "First of all, I don't think [ the term] live art has the same currency in Ireland [ as in the UK, where the festival's performers are based]. Also, it suggests that it would be a survey of live art, and it's actually not: it's edged towards a particular aspect of what can be described as live art, mainly work from a theatre sensibility."
In part, the festival redresses White's concern that Project must live up to its reputation for experimental work; the selection of contemporary British performance also neatly honours the British Council's remit. Asked, though, if he is outsourcing his experimentalism - half of Project's modest programming budget has gone into the festival - White replies: "Outsourcing implies that there are already people delivering this in Ireland and that we can find people abroad to do it cheaper. No. We are an island. We have a very strong literary culture. Performance, to a large extent, must be seen live. If it is not available for us here we must go and seek it out."
The art on offer does have some precedents here. Desperate Optimists, a pair of UK-based Irish multimedia artists, present Civic Life: Moore Street, a film documenting the iconic Dublin street at a cultural turning point. The London company Curious returns with On The Scent, a hands-on exploration of the link between smell and memory that sounds as if it's somewhere between Proust and scratch 'n' sniff.
Newcomers Lone Twin will spend their days cycling around Dublin, then report their discoveries back at Project. Robin Deacon performs Colin Powell, his stand-up routine cum lecture on the US secretary of state. More subversively, perhaps, Joshua Sofaer's The Performance Pack offers a kind of live-art DIY kit, enabling audiences to deliver their own lecture-based performances.
"I want to stimulate people," White says as we begin to watch a video of Marisa Carnesky's Jewess Tattooess, which probes a Jewish taboo and culminates in an act of live tattooing. "Ireland is not some little bastion of formal sanctuary. I am excited by this work, and I'd like to offer it to the audience."
With that, a delicate truce forms while we watch Carnesky work her needles over an already densely inked body. Won't she eventually run out of space? "Yeah," he says, "she will."
About Time runs from Tuesday until Saturday. See www.project.ie
