Pasodos wants to make ballet more accessible and succeeds with its new tango show, discovers Christine Madden.

In one rehearsal room, a tango couple in sweats and dance woollens pivot and twist about the floor with precision and concentrated grace. They relax and smile for a brief moment as they see me watching sheepishly from the sidelines. Then they continue, lost in their labyrinth of human movement. In another, an actor polishes the opening lines - his Shakespeare monologue becomes a dialogue with the music. The melody with which he converses, provided by the director humming a tune, switches on and off in response to his requests regarding "the food of love". On one side of teh room, the ballet couple and a third dancer warm up and go through the motions of their pieces, like liquid snatches of things half-remembered. Elsewhere, a painter and a musiciancraft their contributions to the piece.

To get to this point, Laura Macias and Gavin de Paor, the founders of ballet company Pasodos, have gone through turbulent times and myriad incarnations since their arrival in Ireland 18 months ago.

Yet this wasn't what they had planned when they arrived. "I wanted to sing more and dance less," confides Macias. Born in Palma de Mallorca, Macias received training in ballet and contemporary dance at the Rambert Ballet School in London. She went on to dance with major companies in Spain and Germany, where she not only danced in large-scale classical productions but also appeared in musicals.

After spending his transition year doing a course at the College of Dance, de Paor auditioned for the programme which sent young Irish dance students to the famous Perm Ballet school in Russia. He was one of the last to be chosen on the scheme, and left Skerries in 1993 for the steppes of Russia. When he returned to Ireland in 1998, he became a founder member of Ballet Ireland, then went to Germany to dance in 1999 and met Macias. In returning to Dublin, he was hoping to create a career "fall-back option".

Chance intervened. Unsure what to give a close friend getting married, Macias choreographed a piece for her as wedding gift. The response was overwhelming: "Everyone loved it so much, we needed an encore". And a light went on for Macias. "I thought, oh, my God, I can choreograph."

With a slight frame and elegantly toned limbs, Macias was clearly born to dance. Her ardent enthusiasm for the performing arts spices her natural grace with the sort of cocky élan you would expect of a Spaniard. De Paor's training shows in his performance; their dancing expresses not only ability and professionalism but also their close acquaintance with each other's bodies, limitations and abilities. For choreography, this is a superb enhancement - like a painter who completely understands the nuances and behaviour of paint or the musician who understands the idiosyncrasies of their individual instrument - the choreographer with intimate knowledge of the medium of the body with which he or she is working has an advantage. "When you know what you're good at - I know Gavin's body, and he knows mine - you know what you can exploit," says Macias.

"It can take years to choreograph for a specific dancer," agrees de Paor. In the possession of this advantage, they ventured to put it to best use. Their first programme for the public, Take 2 works in a Continental mix of genres to express the lighter and darker sides of love and desire with lyricism and levity. As a piece of Tanztheater, it combines ballet, tango and contemporary dance with drama, music and visual art for a rich, layered effect. Actor Cathal Quinn joins them throughout, speaking "monologues" that intertwine with the dancing and Tim Morrissey's keyboard music.

Artist John Philip Murray adds the final touch with paintings for the pieces, the work his response to the segments rather than compositions created specifically for them. "It's like he feels inspired by each danced element, and so creates a piece for each one based on that." High Fantastical, the first part of the programme, takes its name from a soliloquy drawn from Twelfth Night, intoned at the outset by Quinn. Beginning with sensuous music from La Traviata, the mood goes through four transformations of desire: fantasy, love, tragedy and humour. Dancer Michael Cooney joins Macias and de Paor in a pas de trois in the third segment for a Jekyll and Hyde depiction of what extreme emotion brings out in an individual.

Previously débuted in a private performance last June, the second half of the programme expands its diversity in The Tango Spell. This piece combines 11 interlinked tangos, performed by two couples on tango heels - with a contemporary dancer, Becky Reilly, on bare feet, and Macias en pointe.

The programme is "organic, but not narrative", says writer and director Tony Norton. "It has a logic, but not a story." Norton came on board to co-ordinate everyone on stage, and to write the monologues and first-act links. "We couldn't have done it all on our own," says de Paor. With Quinn speaking but not dancing among the dancers, who do not speak, The Tango Spell concocts a "cycle of abuse" on stage. Portraying a discarded woman amid a tableau of tango, Macias says her successor suffers the same fate "in the same jewels, clothes, everything".

In creating a pastiche of performing arts in their choreography, de Paor explains: "What we're trying to do is make ballet more accessible to the general public. We're trying to change the perception of it."

De Paor and Macias hope to be able to continue in this vein. With Pasodos now the resident dance company at Theatre Space, they also teach classes there in ballet, contemporary, jazz and tango. They hope things will continue to expand, so they can concentrate on their choreographic work and afford to create future productions.

Take 2 seems to have cast its spell over all the participants. "You know when people come up to you and say, 'Boy, are you lucky to be doing what you love'," says Norton, "and you think, you must be joking - on this occasion, it really is like that.

"I get to be close to dance, to research and read, to go through a kaleidoscope of sight, sound and emotion. And we hope the audience will, too."

Take 2 opens at Theatre Space@the Mint on Friday and continues until January 25th. Booking: 01-8729977. Pasodos website: www.pasodos.com