It's a hugely ambitious piece of dance theatre set on a dodgem track. There'll be pole-dancing and candyfloss, food will be cooked onstage and served up, and audience members can even ride the bumper cars. Fiona McCannattends rehearsals for CoisCéim's new show Dodgems

TWO bumper cars are consigned to the corner, making room for the dancers to prance across the floor on crutches A fez-topped Mark O'Regan mumbles into a megaphone as the cellist at his side abandons her instrument to join the dance, and a man with no legs ambles towards front of stage and climbs onto an enormous suitcase.

Not your traditional theatre fare, then, even if it is still at rehearsal stage. But, then, there's little about Dodgems, the show set to open this year's Dublin Theatre festival, that fits the traditional bill.

Director and choreographer David Bolger is unfazed, his calm amidst the chaos impressive, given that he has charge of what is easily the most ambitious show that dance theatre company CoisCéim has ever undertaken. Such is its scale that a specially designed set had to be commissioned for Dublin's O'Reilly theatre, where a functioning dodgem track is being constructed for the show.

"The set is extraordinary," Bolger tells me, explaining that the whole show takes place on this bumper car ride in the belly of a tiger. "People will be consumed by the set!"

So what possessed him build an entire show around a fairground attraction? Blame playwright Charlie O'Neill, son of a fairground family and grandson of a fortune teller, who earned his own fairground stripes as that shadowy figure from all our childhoods who hopped onto the back of the bumper car to announce that time was up.

"It was a very interesting dynamic to grow up with," admits O'Neill of his fairground roots. "We were both accepted and outsiders at the same time."

This sense of himself as an outsider was something O'Neill drew from in his writing of Dodgems, which explores what happens at the fringes of society to those who are considered, or consider themselves, outsiders. "It comes from the idea that carnival folk were seen as travelling people and there was a suspicion about them," explains Bolger. "They were always left on the borders, and outside."

The show uses this premise as a starting point to examine the outsiders of Irish society, including immigrants, disabled people and people suffering from mental health problems.

For Bolger, choreographing and directing such concepts on a dodgem track was an exciting opportunity. "I thought about the space of the dodgem track, and there's so much movement on a dodgem track," he says. "You've got electricity you've got cold plates, and it's a tough space, it's a place of enjoyment, a place of fear, a place of collision, a place of avoidance. It's got all these metaphoric symbols: it brings people on journeys, people are travelling in the cars, people are having fun, people are not having fun."

Whatever their journeys, all the characters in Dodgemsend up in present-day Ireland, a country that has changed dramatically over the past decade or so, with, as Bolger puts it, "the Celtic tiger, political immigrants, economic immigrants, and having to deal with becoming a multi-ethnic society".

But Bronx-born dancer Jason E Bernard, one of the members of the 12-strong cast, believes many of these themes are not unique to the Irish context. "I think the story is so universal," he says, pointing to the history of migration within his own African-American ancestry, and in his personal family history. "My grandfather was an immigrant in Peru and hid away on a boat to come to America."

Englishman David Toole is remarkable for other reasons - as a dancer without legs. As such, he is used to being seen as different. "It's perfectly natural. If you see something unusual, you react to it. I react to other disabled people when I see them because it's different to me," he says. "I think it's just an inbuilt thing. It's very hard to fight."

These mental preconceptions and subconscious judgments are examined and exploded in Dodgems, in a way that Toole feels can push people outside their comfort zones. "Playing with it is quite interesting," he says, making particular reference to a monologue his character delivers that confronts his own appearance head-on.

"People will be slightly uncomfortable because you're confronting them about the freak element . . . and then it goes somewhere else. People are uncomfortable, but there's a punchline at the end that relieves the tension. I think it will surprise people about what they actually do think."

The show's carnival setting allows Bolger to play with the freak-show history of fairgrounds in a modern context. "The fairground people were always looked at as outsiders, and people with disability will sometimes end up in fairgrounds and freakshows, and that's what's really nice about Dodgems," he says. "It really plays on those things, on freak shows."

Taking on such on such heavy issues as immigration and disability can easily make for a less than entertaining night of theatre, but the creators of Dodgemsare keen to point out that the performance is anything but didactic. "We're not trying to just make political points," says O'Neill. "Art and creative endeavour can create a bit of a space. We shouldn't have to worry about the language or the political correctness, or putting our big CoisCeim foot in it. Let's just do it!" Bolger concurs. "There's a lot of fun in it. It's the whole idea of freakshows and carnivals and audience participation, and huge amounts of storytelling, and huge amounts of dance and music."

With this in mind, there'll be candyfloss and carnival food served to audience members as they enter the space, and some will even have the opportunity to ride the bumper cars. Showtime shenanigans will include pole dancing, ballroom dancing, and all manner of languages, including Parlari, a shared language used by carnival operators to keep their communications secret in front of punters. Where language fails, gestures and sign language are introduced.

The multi-functional set will also be used for some onstage cooking. "We take plantains from Africa and rashers from Ireland and we actually cook them together and make a sandwich," explains Bernard. "It's just a matter of taking all those different aspects of all of our cultures and bringing them together."

"Bringing them together" can involve a black man wearing a girl's Irish dancing costume delivering an explanation of the historical origins of the burqa, which he says was "first handed down from generation to generation by the Burke clan of Tipperary, or, as Gaeilge, 'De Burca'," or simply a group of nuns in bumper cars.

At the centre of it all are the dodgems, and for those of us who know them as bumper cars, it's all in the title. "Fairground people would never deign to call them bumpers, or bumper cars," laughs O'Neill. "They are dodgems. All the skill is in driving to avoid collision."

• Dodgems opens the Dublin Theatre Festival on September 22th at O'Reilly Theatre, Belvedere College, Dublin. www.dublintheatrefestival.com