Maverick US opera and theatre director Peter Sellars, who is in Dublin this weekend, tells Karen Fricker how festivals are the key to getting us through the darkening clouds of another world war.

For those who only know his bad-boy reputation, the inclusion of American opera and theatre director Peter Sellars in an event about artists and social responsibility might seem incongruous. This is, after all, the man whom the media have continued to call an enfant terrible long after the description has ceased to make any factual sense (the enfant in question turned 45 last week).

This is the punky talent who was running the American National Theatre at the age of 26, and whose outrageous updatings of classic operas and plays continually made headlines: he set Mozart and Da Ponte's Marriage of Figaro in a Trump Tower penthouse (Purchase, NY, 1988); Handel's Theodora against the background of the 1993 FBI siege on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco (Glyndebourne, 1996); and Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice amid African-American/Latino violence in post-O.J. Simpson-verdict-Los Angeles (Goodman Theatre, Chicago, 1994).

This is the programmer who has left a string of defunct or debilitated organisations in his wake, most recently the Adelaide Festival in Australia, from which he was forced out late last year as artistic director before his first festival even saw daylight.

But, according to Irish Actors' Equity executive member Rynagh O'Grady, it is Sellars who exemplifies the ideals of an artist's engaged relationship to society that Equity is trying to highlight in its weekend-long conference, "The Status of Performing Artists and their Role in the Life of a Nation," which runs at Liberty Hall this weekend. "Out of all the speakers, Sellars is the person whose work most addresses the issues of this conference. We are thrilled to have him here in Ireland."

Indeed, Sellars's recent CV boasts projects that display an intense engagement with contemporary social problems and global politics: he conceived his current production of Euripides' The Children of Herakles as a way to draw attention to the worldwide plight of refugees. The play, about the attempt of Heracles' descendents to find asylum in the country that banished him, is performed by six professional American actors and a number of children cast from the refugee communities in the areas which the production is being staged (it played last week in Bottrup, Germany as part of the Ruhr Triennale, and will also be presented in Paris, Rome, and Boston). Every performance is preceded by a community forum about displaced people, immigration, and civic responsibility.

He has staged Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale in Los Angeles' MacArthur Park - a location Sellars has described as "the major drug and crime centre of LA" - with the narration delivered in vernacular Spanish by a Latino rap artist (and backed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, one of the world's great orchestras). He and his team worked for months before the production with immigration counselors and needle-exchange programmes to, in his words, "achieve solidarity with the community". Recently, for the Los Angeles Poverty Department, an activist arts organisation, Sellars staged Artaud's last play, To Put an End To the Judgement of God, setting it at a US press conference on the Afghan war, a project that Sellars says aimed to draw attention to the "CIA introduction of crack into America's black communities".

So which is the real Peter Sellars - auteur or activist? His view, clearly, is that he's always been both, and that the cultivation of a high-profile public persona is part of a larger project to assert the crucial role that art and artists can and should play in a conscientious society. "Who's holding the microphone?" was the metaphor he constantly used in our interview. "The need to hand the microphone around is very serious - how do we make sure the right people are being heard, and the right issues?" says Sellars. "One of the main points of theatre right now is how we create public space and how we share that space equally. How do we communicate across distance? How do we find a way to truly share the stage in this world? There is no more important question to be asked."

That Sellars feels the current global situation is a grave one is unquestionable: "We are very close to the brink of world war three, and 'world' is no longer a euphemism. If we are truly at the point where war is going to be declared between the West and all Muslims, I don't think the people who are walking into this know the depth of what will result. There will be riots in the streets all over the world, and cycles of violence will erupt without mercy. We are on the brink of some dangerous stuff."

Sellars's segue from this crisis scenario into a discourse on the role of art in the time of hardship is seamless: "What is going to carry people through these things is values, community values. That's what the Greeks knew when they had festivals - they were there to strengthen communities from the inside."

But surely, Sellars can't believe that festivals can possibly have the same effect in a world where capital has replaced community as our governing value? This is where his optimistic side kicks in: "When capitalism loses its cookies, people are going to have to fall back on what really brings community together, and what makes the world go round. That power is going to be increasingly important as the century grows older." It was this belief in the power of community that fuelled Sellars's re-conception of the Los Angeles Festival, which he ran from 1987 until the mid-1990s, and through which, in the words of Irish scholar Mark Bates, Sellars "steadfastly developed an alternative vision of culture as the practice of everyday life".

Rather than importing a "greatest-hits" slate of major international work, as has become the accepted format for first-world arts festivals from Edinburgh to Dublin to Sydney, Sellars turned the focus to the city of Los Angeles itself, and its extraordinary diversity.

His 1990 festival focused on Pacific Rim cultures, and the 1993 festival on the city's African, African-American, and Middle Eastern populations. In 1990, there were some 150 curated events, including Shinto and Butoh theatre from Japan; folk opera from Thailand; Eskimo dancers from Alaska; and Chinese Kun Opera. Some 1,500 Californian artists also presented their work in an uncurated, "Open Festival." In both festivals, 70 per cent of the performances were free to the public, and by 1993 some half a million Angelinos attended at least one LA Festival event. But the scale and budgetary realties of the festival seem to have become untenable in the long-term; it staggered on for a few years after the 1993 event before shutting down.

It was with a similar zeal for opening up conceptions of Australian culture that Sellars decamped to Adelaide in 2000 to head up that country's largest and most important arts festival. He appointed a team of local curators and co-ordinators and unveiled a programme that included extensive representation of the area's aboriginal populations and youth culture. The programme met with huge resistance from the local media, which characterised Sellars as a purveyor of "politically correct mumbo jumbo" who wilfully disregarded the values of excellence and internationalism that underlay the festival's tradition.

Spiralling budgets - the South Australia Council ended up contributing 10 million Australian dollars to the festival between 2000-2002, nearly double its usual grant levels - and Sellars' perceived inaccessibility (his directing career frequently took him away from Australia) didn't help matters. On November 12th, 2001, the Adelaide Festival announced that Sellars had resigned his position "in aweekend telephone conversation" with his board chairman - Sellars was in Paris at the time. The March 2002 Festival went forward as programmed by Sellars, and met with mixed reviews and relatively disappointing box office figures. The festival is now running a deficit of 370,000 Australian dollars, and both its board chairman and executive director are moving on.

Nearly a year on, Sellars no longer toes the "resignation" line, but finds a typically upbeat spin to how it all turned out: "What was marvellous, an enormously positive side of being fired," he says, a bit of venom entering his enunciation of that final word, "was that what happened was not an Australian festival with an American voiceover. The Australians on the programming team stepped up to the mike.

"So many of the projects they did were thrilling and happened at an amazingly high level. What was great was that the people who should take the credit got the credit." Sean Doran, the Derry native who had a similarly rough ride, early on, in his artistic directorship of the Perth Festival in Western Australia, says Sellars has been scapegoated: "There is no way the catastrophe that was so publicly commented on here and elsewhere is one man's fault. No way. The Adelaide Festival is a risk-taking festival in the first place, and Peter being appointed was a right model. He did take it to extremes - looking at bringing those communities from the periphery into the centre. He turned it on its head, and that is what he set out to do."

It's too early to know if and how these difficult experiences will affect Sellars' career and his choices, but it doesn't seem like his reputation has been too tarnished - at least not in the view of the city of Vienna, which recently asked him to curate their Mozart Year celebrations in 2006. That Sellars did not take a fee for programming either the Los Angles or Adelaide festivals indicates that his personal finances are sound. Keeping a balance in his work between big public projects and small-scale, community-based work seems to be a primary focus: "One of the points of democracy is that as private citizens we engage in public institutions - if we don't do that, they are no longer public. But that can't be all I do." The prospect of a visit to Dublin is clearly delightful to Sellars: "I've never been to Ireland in my life! But the legends are many. Ireland was where Handel came to recover from personal difficulty and became the place where he chose to stage the premiere of the Messiah - as a benefit for prison reform! I do associate that kind of enlightenment with Ireland. Artists seem to always have been involved in the formation of Ireland's national temper."

An hour into our conversation, and Sellars is still going a mile a minute. "What role does theatre have to play in the 21st century? Huge! Look at the last century and the advent of its two major art forms, television and film. They are inherently undemocratic - you can't talk back to a screen! Nobody is going to be safe until we are all in a room together, facing each other, and dealing with the issues that face the world. Building consensus, community, and coalition - only theatre can do that."