It seems easy enough to imagine virtual places in these days of chat rooms and cyberspace. In Limerick last week, the White Space opened its doors again to allow dancers to explore and discuss aspects of their practice, this time guided by Yvonne Rainer, the US choreographer and film-maker.

The White Space is not another new building in the ever-growing campus of the University of Limerick, but a virtual space formed by Yoshiko Chuma, Daghdha Dance Company's artistic director, with Mary Nunan, the dance lecturer who founded the company in the late 1980s.

"Mary came up with the name," says Chuma, "and the idea was of a place that people could come that was completely fresh and new. Just like a blank white copybook before it is written on, the White Space provides a new environment for people to come together for three or four days."

A mix of students and professional dancers have mingled at the sessions, which have attracted well-known figures such as Rainer and Steve Paxton. The choice of artists reflects the desire of the White Space organisers to investigate the history of postmodernism and performance theory.

Paxton and Rainer are central figures in the Judson Dance Group, which gave birth to the postmodern dance movement as it evolved around Judson Church, in the Greenwich Village area of New York, during the 1960s.

Chuma is keen to point out that artists are chosen not just for their historical importance, but also for the way their ideas resonate in the 21st century. Trio A, which Rainer taught to Irish dancers last Wednesday, "has as much impact now as it did in the 1960s", she says.

Rainer nevertheless remains a historically important figure in a defining period in the history of dance. Part of this history was recounted in Out Of A Corner Of The 60s, a slide and video lecture that Rainer directed at the University of Limerick in collaboration with Critical Voices, the programme that the Arts Council is running in conjunction with The Irish Times and Lyric FM.

The politics and outlook of the Judson Dance Group can probably be best summed up by Rainer's manifesto, which was published in the Drama Review in 1965. "No to spectacle, no to virtuosity, no to transformations and magic and make-believe, no to the glamour and transcendency of the star image, no to the heroic . . ."

Organised as a co-operative and performing in non-theatre spaces, the group eschewed traditional notions of dance as displays of physical virtuosity cloaked in the veneer of theatrical "magic". Dancers performed alongside non-dancers, who included many artists who were mixing disciplines within the politicised art world of Greenwich Village.

Visual artists, musicians and film-makers took part in Happenings; amateur actors performed in off-off-Broadway productions. There was no shortage of artists willing to take part in the Judson dances, and their "untrained" bodies reinforced the use of everyday actions and gestures. Dances could include eating, ironing a dress or walking. These actions rejected the "elitism" of dance training and underlined the belief that art is a part of everyday life.

There was also a belief that the character on stage could be known only through the body. Within the theatre world, Joseph Chaiken had written that "all one's past - historically and evolutionary - is contained in the body". And, he said, "many people live in their bodies like in abandoned houses, haunted with the memories of when they were occupied". The belief that the body was central to consciousness led Rainer to create The Mind Is A Muscle, the evening-length work that contains Trio A, her signature piece.

Revisiting the work in an interview with Lyn Blumenthal in 1976, she remembered being "awfully excited about Trio A. I felt I had done something difficult and new. Everyone learned the identical sequence. We began at slightly different times - like within 10 seconds of each other. And each person had his or her own pace. In learning it, you had to find a pacing that created the right look, but that was also appropriate to your body and your own way of hauling yourself around".

Another important device was the lack of eye contact with the audience. "I had been criticised by Steve \ in particular for exploiting my own charisma," she said, "so I thought I wouldn't pander to the audience or seduce them with my presence. I was very much aware and had even perhaps written about the narcissistic involvement of the performer. I was certainly aware of my own narcissistic pleasure."

In 1972, she completed Lives Of Performers, her first feature-length film, and soon had abandoned dance-making altogether. Many of her dance works had included film, slides and video, but it still seemed a radical departure, leaving the physicality of the body for the two-dimensional screen. "It was narrative," she says. "The conventions of cinematic narratives seemed to offer more possibilities and were more interesting to me to operate both within and against."

Since then she has made six more feature-length films, including Privilege, from 1990, which was shown last week at the White Space. Critically acclaimed at film festivals and a prize-winner at the Sundance festival in the year it was made, Privilege mixes interviews with women talking about their experience of menopause, educational videos on menopause and a staged interview with a middle-aged African-American. "Every character in the film can be seen as either having or not having privilege, depending on race, sex, class or age," she says. "Privilege is a crucial term in the film, a kind of prism through which all the issues can be observed."

Judson Church Group had a reunion two years ago, for which Rainer agreed to perform Trio A. One attendee was the Russian former ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov, who decided to stage a series of postmodern works.

And so, coming full circle, Rainer returned to dance in June last year by choreographing After Many A Summer Dies The Swan for White Oak, Baryshnikov's contemporary-dance company, at Brooklyn Academy of Music. Last week in Limerick, 35 years after its first performance, Trio A was restaged for the White Space participants, and Rainer left her piece of history in Irish dancer's bodies.

And the next White Space? "It will be completely different," says Chuma. "Each artist is different, and it's very dangerous to formulate the White Space. I'm interested in the people who come here and the works that they bring with them. That alone will dictate what will happen. We'll start with a blank white space."