"I'D rather 10,000 people came to see our work than 10," says David Bolger, artistic director of CoisCeim Dance Theatre. Bolger's might be an aspiration shared by many of Ireland's young dance companies, but since 1994 CoisCeim, a dance company whose work is equally comfortable being hilarious, erotic and satirical, has done more than most to give contemporary dance in Ireland a youthful, attractive image.

After six productions, CoisCeim had perhaps its busiest year yet in 1996, when it toured three new works around Ireland, as well as performing and giving workshops in Edinburgh, becoming the first Irish company to feature in London's Spring Loaded dance festival, and travelling to Marseilles as part of Project Arts Centre's Irish arts festival in the city. The company's latest show, Hit And Run, will be the first performance when a new Dublin venue opens next week.

"We originally wanted to do the piece in a nightclub," says Bolger, speaking after a long day's rehearsals "but it turned out not to be that practical. I mean we're not Macnas, we're a young company and we can't just walk in somewhere and say we want to perform here'." Luckily for Bolger and his company, Project Arts Centre's temporary base at The Mint in Henry Street seemed to make an equally appropriate venue for what rapidly turned into a site specific performance.

The biggest attraction of Project's new home (the centre will be based there for two years while building work goes con at its Temple Bar base) was the atmosphere. "It was down a lane and over a pool hall; it was just perfect," says Bolger. "I liked the kind of Twilight Zone feel of the area, the way it has a completely different character when the day people go home and the night people take over...

Helping to enhance this mood will be what Bolger describes as a "3D ambient urban landscape in sound" by sound artists Conor Kelly and Sam Park, under the moniker Bell, Helicopter.

If Bolger's vision is realised, Hit And Rain will be a piece that "lives in the space rather, than just uses it as a theatre. It's not just a safe little dance piece that is all very nice... It does talk about the kind of city we live in, about club culture, about E-culture, about a city in which you might be able to hire a gun for £50, or have somebody killed for £500, a city ink which something like the shooting of Veronica Guerin can happen.