Four skinny young men stand with their T-shirts pulled up over their heads, arms truncated, like improbable Venus de Milos. Slowly their bring their arms down, pause and briefly examine their navels.
The nine minutes of dance that follow take their cue from that gesture. This is a quiet, meditative piece, in which the four dancers move in a loose diamond formation, each in his own space, but acknowledging the others' existence. Moving singly or in pairs, slowly, delicately they sketch sequences of circular movements, using pelvic rotations, shoulder shrugs and Tai Chi-style treading and swaying, as the soaring trumpet of Jan Garbarek blends with the Hilliard Ensemble's plain chant on the tape deck.
Intense and detailed discussion follows between the choreographer, Paul Johnson, and the dancers, Kevin Murphy, Paris Payne, Thomas Langkau and Jonathan Mitchell, who tease and mimic him, and fall around laughing at his attempts to video the dance. This is very much a collaborative exercise, and the sense of intruding on a private kind of dance therapy increases as Johnson listens to their contributions and nods ruminatively.
"You collectively need to decide to resolve it . . . That's a good approach, yes, but all the choices made by everyone else are just as valid . . . "
To be performed in public tomorrow night, this dance work is one part of the year-long work-in-progress being created by Johnson, who is choreographer-in-residence at The Project Arts Centre. Three segments will come together to culminate in a performance of a new work for eight male dancers at the end of the year, but for now the emphasis is on the process of devising work, rather than the finished product.
"Working this way is an enormous luxury and it hasn't been done in this country before," Johnson says. "It's a unique opportunity to be painstakingly slow and to acknowledge that all the dancers have a voice and are intelligent. It's not just a question of me as choreographer telling them what to do. It's coming from them too. They own the work and take responsibility for it."
Do they need an audience at all, or could this work be viewed as a process of self-examination? "It certainly is cathartic and internalised, as you saw today, but what happens between now and when we present it publicly is that the emphasis will shift to communicating what it's all about. For me dance is a living art form - it doesn't exist without an audience. I dance to communicate."
Too often contemporary dance performances do not seem to succeed in communicating, however, and audiences struggle to respond to new work which comes across as opaque, unreadable and inaccessible. Johnson is conscious of the need to build and nurture an audience for dance here, particularly in a city with such a strong theatrical tradition, where performances are often expected to have some narrative core.
"The profession has a responsibility to develop work that does speak to people. Through this residency I have an opportunity to respond imaginatively to that criticism. It takes time to develop new work and one reason that dance is inaccessible is the pressure on a choreographer to get a new work out quickly. "There is no reason why we should be performing new work all the time, but it's understandable that companies wish to do so, since it's such an underdeveloped art form here. But it would be an interesting experiment for a company to go back to something they've done a few years before."
This is, in effect, what Johnson does all the time: returning to themes and issues that have become the backbone of his work as dancer and choreographer for the past six years. Devised with his regular collaborators, composer Eugene Murphy and lighting designer Paul Keogan - who together form the core of the artistic team called Mandance - the new work-in-progress continues Johnson's exploration, with male dancers, of the construct of masculinity: "what it means to be a man now, using the medium of dance.
"In a subtle way, this piece subverts our preconceptions," Johnson says. "There's no brash, bravura movement. There's a lot of ordinary stuff in it, rather than dramatic displays. It's showing how men dancing together, being together, can co-exist peacefully, intimately and honestly and that this is not rooted in any single sexual orientation - heterosexual or homosexual. "It's not propaganda, it's not misogynistic, or anti-anything. It's just a different way of presenting dance. I want to tap into the strong male trait of physicality, and send it on a different path, so that it's not about pure strength or aggressive competitiveness. I want to show people that it's possible for men to dance, to communicate through their bodies, without it being seen purely in terms of sexuality."
The history of classical ballet, in particular, has certainly not favoured men, who have been valued traditionally for their usefulness as props and launch-pads for the ballerina, hoisting and catching her as she flits decoratively into the limelight. There are occasional compensations, of course, especially in the Bolshoi tradition, with its bursts of virtuoso display and athletic leaping, while individual artists such as Nijinsky, Nureyev and Baryshnikov have extended the possibilities for male dancers enormously this century. But contrasts between female ethereality and speed and male muscle and height are built into the formal vocabulary of ballet, while, paradoxically, the popular image of male ballet dancers - "men in tights" - is one of emasculated weakness. "I want to play with that classical image of the male dancer's virtuosity and strength, and his perceived weakness," Johnson says. "I'm trying to get away from all those labels." But isn't this kind of rigid gender prescription damaging to both women and men, with both sexes trapped in their roles? "Yes, of course. But I see men suffering from it more at the moment. Even their body language is so inhibited. They're closing in on themselves, becoming closeted. They are being dismissed if they are not fit, tall, slim and conventionally good-looking. They are also called emotionally unavailable, dead from the neck up. I want to show that men are not weak - that for men to move is a positive experience."
In contrast to ballet, contemporary dance, especially since the 1970s, has increasingly espoused androgyny in dancers and in choreography, and the issue of gender roles in dance is still very much alive. Mark Morris's innovative international company consistently reverses gender stereotypes, and, in Britain, The Featherstonehaughs play with macho cliches, DV8 Physical Theatre explores gay issues of narcissism and desire, and recently Mathew Bourne's electrifying, all-male version of Swan Lake combined extraordinary lyricism, sensuality and eroticism with the traditional power and strength of the male dancer. "Yes, roles are becoming more fluid," Johnson says, "and one way of doing that is through contact-improvisation work, where dancers work with partners, physically interacting, so that each is both giving and taking the weight of the other. So everyone gets to be lifted and to support, developing balance and co-ordination, which is what's needed, rather than brute strength."
After all the restraint and calm of the work-in-progress, there's a sudden explosion of energy at the end of the session as the four dancers break out into athletic leaping, twisting, high kicking and arabesques. As I look back over my shoulder they are sliding and spinning across the floor, pulling each other along on rubber mats at top speed. Johnson shrugs and winks. "Boys will be boys, eh?"
`It takes time to develop new work and one reason that dance is inaccessible is the pressure on a choreographer to get a new work out quickly'
`I want to show that it's possible for men to dance, to communicate through their bodies, without it being seen purely in terms of sexuality'
Paul Johnson at rehearsals for Without Hope or Fear: Photograph: Bryan O'Brien.
