Take five dancers, one choreographer, five solos, one director, no soundscape, and make of it an evening of engaging dance theatre. This unusual show was a masterclass in how intense, focused work, driven from within the artist, can enhance in every way the concept of performance – especially, if you are lucky, as here, to be in the company of choreographer Deborah Hay and the distilled refinement of these young dancers.

In a reconfigured Project space, creating an oblong with the audience on three sides, we watched the five commissioned solos, performed within the strict and regulated boundaries of Hay’s particular way of working. No musical score or decorated set, as the staging of this collection is stripped back to the essentials to allow the relationship of the body with time and space to be all the more defined. Each of the excellent dancers, some of whom have worked with this pioneering American’s choreography in the past, produced a gem of understated work. This was the result of close collaboration between practice and process, mind and body, and was ultimately a grounding and a preparation for performance.

The five dancers wander around in white lab coats as the audience is being seated, before cordoning off with red ribbon the area in which the first solo will be performed. The set up is framed as a controlled experiment which, in a way, is what it is. For, while Hay does not provide a set of moves to be perfectly replicated and there is no notation in the more usual sense, what she does hand down is a blueprint for interpretation. This is where director Jason Byrne stepped in, staging the five dancers together in this imaginary house of crossed destinies, grouping the solos, three then two, and thereby creating a theatrical and quasi-narrative backstory, in an experiment of forensic intensity.

While each solo conjures a different atmosphere and moves to a distinctive rhythm, there are shared elements. In each, there is playfulness contrasted with utter seriousness and some common styled moves and ideas – some from Hay herself. Others leans towards her early mentor Merce Cunningham, and some even intimate Beckett. The melding of all these offers a window on how the dancers assemble their own resources and quirky traits. It begins to be clear, too, that there is strong common identification with an inner conductor, an invisible baton summoning a range of orchestral manoeuvres, sudden gestures or low throated murmurings. Feet and arms, in particular, are almost perpetually in motion and, intermittently, human voices break into guttural fragments or snatches of song.

Emma Fitzgerald is first up, as she dons a red check shirt and neat black shoes for her delightful and slightly skittish exploration in The Room. We see stuttering movement, small steps followed by phases of contented smooth gentle dance, swivelled hips and arms aloft as humming happily to herself she fades in and out of this private space that is both physical and metaphorical. At one point the stage goes dark, a stop-go concept repeated in other solos. By contrast, there is Cindy Cummings' ruminative exploration in her solo Beauty, a more anxious piece of work, strutting about as she and her body seem to restlessly challenge her environment. With absorbing and deliberate moves she carefully measures her body’s strength and image limb by limb, stretching her dusty pink heeled shoes against the floor, eventually revelling in it all – quietly.

Before that, Áine Stapleton more noisily took to the space in The Runner. She is definitely on the move here, propelled from within, her being almost declamatory, her movements wide and gestural. Sweeping her arms in benediction she stomps about in natty ankle boots, interrogating the space, her voice plumbing the depths of her being in gravelly tones before rising again with a skittering stew of words. Those occasional words spoken, whispered or sung during these solos seem to emerge as though the body instinctively knows when the movement needs company.

Words are most comprehensively assembled in the short fragment of storytelling which punctuates I'll Crane for You with Julie Lockett. Performance becomes parade in this piece as she swans around the stage, barefoot in a scarlet off the shoulder operatic dress. Her movement subtly elucidates her secret memories and like some latter day demented Gloria Swanson, complete with turban and a charcoal moustache, she offers a story about a gold heeled slipper. Just the one apparently, as she tells us, the other foot remaining bare while the neighbours gawped. She paces the margins, cranes her torso dramatically, and then responding to the glare of the footlights (perfectly theatrical lighting throughout from Sarah Jane Shiels) comes centrestage again.

Ella Clarke, co-director with Lockett of the Genesis Project [a separate initiative, from which this work developed] is also on a memory jag in her compelling solo, complete with ballet tutu, sports bra and sparkling white running shoes. As if to underline the emphasis on the choreography of interpretation rather than set moves, this is a second and contrasting reading of The Runner. As in the other solos, the imagination of the audience is part of the experience. The lighting here and there is manipulated to illuminate the frosted white of her tulle skirt, a throwback to romantic ballets. That past floats by us in the gently intimated graceful half pliés and porte de bras but is paralleled with more athletic phases, the crouching and repetitive strained moves of a workhorse. An anonymous corps de ballet cog perhaps, for her gesture and movement is inconsistent with the confidence of a diva or ballerina assoluta.

It was easy to understand why Jason Byrne might wish to corral these uniquely commissioned solo dances into a performance collective, and he subtly adds to the experience. For the work does not stray too far from the intensity of an actor’s preparation for exposure in theatrical performance, especially in the final two solos which are almost dramatic dance monologues. The evening was all about performance, engagement, inner energy and inner rhythms. As an actor learns to inhabit a character to make it his or her own, so the dancers in the Hay process inhabit the choreography to hone their own reading in form and content.

In these dark recessionary days these reflections are the sparks that inspire the artist and illuminate the rest of us.

Seona Mac Réamoinn is a journalist and critic.