But Daniel Vais did not know the day he will arrive on Cape Clear is the day of the annual Cape Clear Regatta. He didn't know the island's small North Harbour would be besieged by the luxury yachts and cruisers of west Cork's glitterati. He didn't know the narrow roads leading up from the harbour would be thick with teenage sailor-boys in rugby jerseys with pints of Heineken and girls in belly tops with pint bottles of Bulmers. And, when he does arrive, Daniel Vais is at least mildly surprised to find, in this place of traditional music and dance, that the highlight of the regatta is the Alternative Miss Cape Clear competition, which has just been won by a fiftysomething beer-keg of a fellow with a silver disco wig and bursting belly top.

Daniel Vais, however, is a professional. He has come to Cape Clear to dance, and dance he will.

"I'm an old-fashioned travelling dancer, " he says. "I travel. I dance."

Cape Clear is the second stop on an eccentric, adhoc tour of the western islands, funded by the Arts Council, during which he is following an improvised itinerary and doing improvised performances for those he encounters. The point of it all? He illustrates this more easily than he explains it.

Last year, on a visit to Inis Meain, he met a group of young gaeilgeoiri at the Irish college and did a spontaneous, 20-minute solo performance for them. They liked it so much (rather better than their ceili, in fact), they asked him to do a workshop. "There are no rules, " he told them. "Just dance."

And they did. Vais found the experience so rewarding he conceived of a tour designed to facilitate similar, spontaneous encounters.

Daniel Vais believes dance is transformative. On this island tour, and with much of his work with groundbreaking Limerick company Daghdha (Vais, an Israeli, is now based in Limerick), he cares less about technical skill and virtuoso ability than about instinct and innate rhythm.

Anybody can be a dancer.

This tour, and his work with Daghdha, is part propaganda for this worldview. Everywhere he goes, he seeks to lead people out of the physical and emotional cul-desacs into which their inhibitions and life experiences lead them. He leads them literally . . . he draws people out of the watching audience and encourages them to dance with him. It doesn't necessarily make for good performance (in a conventional sense) . . . but it makes for intriguing social dynamics. And, Vais believes, it can make for positive social development. He calls it "social choreography". "I set the conditions for things to happen, " he says. He blurs the boundaries between high art, outreach and avant-garde experimentation.

And so Daniel Vais, social choreographer, a short, lithe, dark, handsome thirtysomething Israeli, arrives off the Baltimore-to-Cape Clear ferry at 4.30pm on regatta day and is greeted by a fetid mass of that peculiar breed of Irish humanity that equates summer with G&Ts in the cockpit while moored off Schull.

Within an hour of landing, Daniel Vais . . . accompanied by a taller version of himself, a Londonbased Israeli filmmaker named Joel Cahen . . . is setting up his sound equipment on the stage only recently vacated by the Alternative Miss Clare Island contestants. A missing cable doesn't deter them as they place a microphone running from the amplifier nestling inside a pair of headphones running from Vais's iPod.

The crowd has thinned suddenly: the last of the daytrippers have left for the last ferry.

The setting of the sun over the hill behind Cotter's pub has encouraged many of the sailors back to their yachts and thence, leisurely, to their homes in Schull and Baltimore. But there are still 20 or so people standing out front of Cotter's (in some cases, barely standing) and they cast a curious eye towards the stage as an exotic, rhythmic, Mediterranean music starts to play from the speakers.

"Will ye turn that down a bit, " roars a red-faced fellow.

Others are more benevolent.

"This man is going to play a performance, " announces a man in sky-blue trousers, to whom Vais has been talking. "He's an eccentric wally, but he's lovely. He came all the way from Israel."

Daniel Vais hands out disposable cameras: asking people to photograph his performance proves to be an ingenious way of disarming them and bringing them onside. Then he shakes a piece of thin, tasselled, red material out of a bag, wraps it around his waist, and strikes a still, elegant pose, with his back to his small and tipsy audience, who have nervously taken up seats in front of the stage.

And so Daniel Vais dances.

"Up ye, lad, " says someone.

"F***in' handsome, isn't it, " says another.

"Costs, m'lord, " says a third. (It isn't clear why, though a rumour circulates later that this particular group of yachtsmen may have been a delegation from the Law Library. ) Daniel Vais's dance veers from the graceful to the provocative to the silly. There are elegant, careful, abstract moves and then belly-dance shimmering and hip shaking that makes some laugh and other uncomfortable.

Throughout, there is an additional soundtrack of the whirring of disposable cameras being quickly wound on. He captures his audience, sets some of them laughing and others swaying.

By the end of the number, two women are on the point of joining him on stage, just as the music runs out. He does a second number but the mood has moved on and the small crowd, attention spans shortened by alcohol, has lost interest. "The line between making a joke out of myself or being a great artist is so thin, " says Vais afterwards, perched on a wall overlooking the harbour. "I knew I shouldn't do something very heavy. If they [the audience] are drinking, I know I can't go very deep into the dance . . . I have to keep it more 'up'."

Using belly dance moves is one way of doing this. If an audience heckles or takes the piss, he will use "a very extreme belly dance" and "try to dance very hard at them", either winning them over through humour or embarrassing his antagonists into silence. But he's no purist about his dance.

"It's not holy. It's not untouchable. To take it outside the theatre gives permission to the audience [to do as they like]. This kind of thing . . . you can do what you want, talk between you, drink, laugh, it's okay."

Vais and his colleague head off to pitch their tent, overlooking the island's south harbour. Later in the evening, we meet in Danny Mike's pub and then make our way to the Club, a room upstairs from An Siopa Beag at the North Harbour. It's an elegant, loft-style, small room with a wooden floor for dancing and signs in Irish.

("Jax" and "Banjax" are two of them. ) There is a session on and, before long, Vais is up talking to one of the musicians.

"Ciunas for a spectacular act from Israel, " the musician announces, as Vais hands a CD to the barman.

There's a momentary hiatus as the barman tries to get the CD player to work . . . and a conversation in Irish with a customer about which button on the stereo to press . . . and Vais hands out his disposable cameras.

The CD is one Vais has just received . . . a purist for improvisation, he has never even listened to it . . . and the music is extraordinary; abstract and ambient.

This time, he goes deeper into the dance: his movement is slow and ethereal and the tone is of sadness and, perhaps, tragedy.

And he can dance: there are moments of beauty in this brief, extemporary solo. He follows this with another belly dance number.

But he has misjudged his environment, has overestimated his audience's interest. They don't get the joke and grow restless. He brings a woman up to join him and she briefly adds momentum but his efforts to entice others on to the dance floor are ignored.

"Turn that f***ing thing off, " says a young, strong fellow in an Irish rugby jersey.

Vais finishes to a polite applause and the musicians call for singers. Though "singer" turns out to be a euphemism.

There is a large group of Americans and Australasians in the Club who are either working in the B&Bs for the summer or staying in the youth hostel and a succession of these proceed to murder various folk classics, to the approval of their peers and the relentlessly enthusiastic musicians.

Joel Cahen mutters a dismissive comment about the staples of student singsongs and faux-traditional culture and, as if on cue, a group takes to the floor to sing Simon & Garfunkel's 'The Boxer' . . . in Irish.

Outside, Vais talks to the woman he danced with. She tells him (as he recounts to us later) that she is extremely shy and would never dream of dancing in front of a crowd, or at all; that she doesn't know how to dance. He tells her she is a dancer and that he could see it in the way she watched him dance.

This is Daniel Vais's "social choreography" on an intimate scale: he has provoked a genuine reaction, he has formed a connection with someone. It may have been transformative. It's enough to justify his dance, and his visit to Cape Clear.

It doesn't bother him that not everyone was so touched. "I'll tell you one thing, " he says. "They'll all go home tonight and do a little dance to themselves."

The next morning, he sets off again, in heavy rain and across rough seas, in search of another island to dance on. This time, though, it won't be hosting a regatta. This time, perhaps he will dance in nature and for nature, or barter a dance for a story. Who knows.