Androgynous bodies. The politics of the body. A body on video talking to a body on stage. A body still. The culturally encoded body. Bodily substances. What's going on?

Appropriately, the person responsible is Perfect.

Sascha Perfect. She explains.

"I became interested in the question, 'EU or non EU?' Who's included in Europe and why are they included? Is it about imperialism?"

I don't know. She clarifies.

"These are questions that a lot of young people are asking. Where do you place yourself? What's your identity?

"We're all becoming global. But there are some structures out there that make things different."

All clear? Some context: Perfect, a Kiwi with Irish connections, studied dance and performance in Serbia, then moved to Ireland. Realising it was going to be difficult to keep her finger on the pulse of Central European culture, she set up the Balkan Irish Arts Forum. They've organised a short festival at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin, from 4 to 7 July, under the enigmatic title 'Have U-Met Nosti?' (It's simply a pun: umet-nosti means "art" in Serbia and Slovenia. ) The press release for this festival is an extraordinary work in itself, worthy of Foucault.

Most of the performers seem to be questioning whether there's any point in performing at all.

Given that Perfect is a performance artist and works in the Irish Museum of Modern Art, it wouldn't be entirely surprising if none of them existed and the idea of the festival was the work of art. This idea gains some traction when I phone one of the performers, in Bulgaria, and am briefly shouted at and hung up on.

So it's a relief to reach Marko Bulc, writer, director and actor of The Last Egoistic Performance.

Bulc, a 33-year-old Slovenian theatre director and sometime journalist, copywriter and photocopier, says his is a "very classical dramatic piece, just done with one actor." So it has a beginning, a middle and an end? "Um, no. It's not classical in that sense.

"Normally, you have the text and then you make the performance. This process was the other way around. The text is based on the performance."

So what's it about, Marko?

"I spoke with my alter ego in rehearsals. I was trying to speak with myself about my work. Cross examining my ego."

It is, he says, very funny. Bulc sees the festival as "a bit like a zoo, or an anthropological exhibition from the beginning of the 20th century: these are the wild creatures from the Balkans that are coming up to Dublin." That would have been an interesting line for the press release. But it harks back to Perfect's point about globalisation and difference: if Perfect wants to raise questions of European homogeneity and boundaries, Bulc relishes subverting them.

There'll be plenty of chance to have this out with the performers themselves, says Perfect, and she's running a "salon event" at the conclusion of the festival to help get everyone talking. In the meantime, a last word of caution from Marko.

"I'm sort of making this up a little bit. But most of it's true."

'Have U-Met Nosti?'

at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 4-7 July, www. balkanirish artsforum. com