How can playing 'tag' in their socks and wearing masks helpactors in their craft? Belinda McKeon kicked off her shoes to find out

So you're an actor and Dublin City Council informs you that you've just won a performance award. What does this entail? A whirlwind of interviews, of schmoozing and speech-writing, of basking in the warmth of critical acclaim? Or five days spent shoeless in a modest studio at the Gaiety School of Acting, toying with masks of white plastic and drawing circles in the air with copper rods, while the sole media presence - this journalist, invited to participate rather than just observe - cuts less than a dash in the mismatched socks she thought no one would see?

Here's a clue: the award sponsored by the City Council was established four years ago to commemorate Thom McGinty, the street performer known as The Diceman, whose unconventional art form brought colour and extravagance to Grafton Street long before the boom. Each year, a number of actors are selected by the City Council, on the basis of their CVs, for an intensive, week-long performance workshop, with their participation paid for by the Council. The absence of a lavish awards bash is compensated for by an invaluable opportunity to compare and diversify techniques, to learn new approaches and to take constructive criticism, all of which works to expand the actors' theatrical horizons and to boost them in the search for work. And all of which this year's group of actors, 14 parts Irish and one part French, aged from their 20s to their 40s, carry out in their stockinged feet, frequently puzzled and often helpless with laughter; this certainly looks like The Diceman's kind of award.

This year's workshop leader, Philip Beaven, confesses to knowing little about Thom McGinty. Yet with Moving Word, the Sussex-based theatre company which he founded in 1991, he has created a style of theatre in that performer's vein.

Guided by the principles of eurythmy, a quasi-mystical "movement art" developed in the early 20th century on the basis of the teachings of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, Moving Word shows incorporate music, dance, puppetry and painting to heighten awareness of movement, sound and colour in a blend which attempts to voice the essence of being human. It's an approach which is much in evidence as Beaven sets this year's award recipients to work; a complicated, rhythmical game of rod-passing soon gives way to a clamorous contest of tag, to be followed by a walk-copying exercise, which is succeeded by a ceremonious donning of masks.

Surveying the spectacle of 15 adults hurtling around the confined space of the studio and shouting one another's names, it might be wondered whether the City Council, too, has lost the run of itself in sponsoring this release of the energies of out-of-work actors. But The Diceman's legacy is indeed at work. There's a method to all of this madness.

What's taking place under Beaven's watchful eye is no gratuitous gaming frenzy, but a programme of exercises designed to help actors to take a close look at their art, to lay bare the methods they have long practised, so that the sources of what may develop into problems onstage may be addressed. It's a process of dissection that is fascinating to watch. What becomes clear is that beneath the edifice of theatre, there is at work a complex and tentative network; beneath a flawed play, a web of individual errors so tangled that resolution demands a total unweaving and a fresh start. The true challenge of good acting is beginning to show itself.

Beaven explains that each exercise in the workshop has a purpose related to this challenge. The "tag" game, where survival depends on shouting out another player's name an instant before being tagged, recreates the atmosphere of a stage upon which a missed cue or a forgotten line has unleashed panic. The key to coping with such a situation, the actors learn, is to stay alert, to have a coping strategy at the ready - just like being ready to tag back straightaway. "This is a moment where the structure has fallen away, and you have a free moment," explains Beaven. "That you have messed up is irrelevant; this is a chance to create something. Otherwise both you and the others will fall apart onstage."

And this sense of duty to the group informs another game, in which it becomes clear that the actors are not simply passing copper rods around in a circle but are, rather, replicating the rhythm, the trust, which characterises the experience of working as an ensemble. As a demanding number of rods come into play, Beaven encourages the actors to take a peripheral view of what is happening around them, to look straight ahead and take everything in, rather than focusing on only one side of the action. Maintaining the rhythm of the group is vital; it becomes clear how one nervous performer, one edgy body, can disrupt the flow of an ensemble, how one small mistake onstage can cause a blockage to bring down the whole production.

Theatre which draws upon the resources of the actor's body rather than the pre-mapped contours of a character to tell a story is much less evident here than in other European countries, despite the work of companies such as Operating Theatre and Loose Canon. But while naturalistic drama - unkindly generalised as "acting from the neck up" - remains the norm and the most reliably funded type of Irish theatre, the McGinty workshop suggests that Irish actors are open to a more physical and experimental type of theatre.

The neutral mask method, by which actors are encouraged to find a way of performing without character, without plot, is greeted with enthusiasm by these participants, who strive to meet Beaven's request for a stage presence that is in fact characterised by absence, by bodies as still as stone, by quiet blankness that allows a scene to emerge without props or narrative.

"We are looking," explains Beaven, "for the space before character, before the story begins." A low shoulder can suggest tension. The actors agree that an audience should be intimately involved in the theatrical experience, should be stimulated, rather than spoon-fed, by what happens onstage. But Beaven points out that sometimes this can be a risky venture; sometimes an audience may prefer the comfort of having the story spelled out. And while Beaven's methods comprise less a style to compete with naturalistic theatre than an approach to the experience of being onstage - which may enrich any production from the bizarrely experimental to the benignly traditional - yet the climate for development of that approach remains less than hospitable.

With eurythmic theatre still widely viewed as a sectarian art form in England, because of its link with the religious-scientific vision of Rudolf Steiner, the Arts Council and other bodies are not interested in funding Moving Word productions. Consequently, the cost of touring Europe and the US is met by patching together contributions from various foundations and smaller arts organisations.

Back in Dublin, meanwhile, there's a sizeable chance that the Thom McGinty Award winners will have to go some distance to utilise the skills of devising ensemble work and neutral presence which they have developed in this workshop. As one participant observes, slow-burning methods of making theatre are hardly compatible with the snappy rehearsal periods which are the norm in Ireland.

This, of course, is not a uniquely Irish problem, but coupled with the continuing predominance here of the linear, naturalistic form, it throws unflattering light on the funding structure which is decisive in determining what audiences see on Irish stages.

The participants in the workshop talk of the thrill of performing in an environment where there is no agenda, no pressure to come up with a product, rather simply the freedom to learn and to experiment. But they, and Beaven, are aware of the probability that, once this week of education is over, they will once again struggle against certain limiting conceptions of what theatre should be.

As a small studio swells with energy, as actors are freed of inhibitions and grow eager to pool their physical and intellectual resources, Dublin City Council is to be praised for recognising The Diceman's contribution to cultural life, and for providing a structure where his legacy may work its magic on a younger generation of performers.

But in the course of a five-day workshop, only inklings of that magic, only the beginnings of that legacy can appear. The Diceman's style, after all, developed over two decades, from initial, eye-catching appearances on Grafton Street in the late 1970s into the rich and inimitable presence for which he is remembered. These things take time, and time takes money; with this award now in its fourth year, the signs are certainly encouraging. However, if the legacy of The Diceman is to endure beyond the City Council's commendable gesture of commemoration, then so, too, must the exemplary generosity behind that gesture. Here's to next year.