The double-bind theory on schizophrenia is the starting point for a collaborative dance piece - but no one quite knows where it ends, its creators tell Christine Madden

What Lego is to kids, chairs are to performing artists. Your average punter thinks a chair is a seating opportunity with back support, and possibly armrests. But the performing artist sees a building block, a prop, an obstruction, a conduit - "it's the element that can be anything", says dancer/choreographer Jone San Martin. In collaboration with Agnès Chekroun and Fabrice Mazliah, she has created Double B(l)ind, a dance piece that runs at the Samuel Beckett Theatre next week - and features two dancers and 26 chairs.

No stranger to the creative possibilities of chairs himself, John Scott, artistic director of Irish Modern Dance Theatre, has collaborated with these choreographers over the years. His company is acting as their producer, making it possible for them to visit Dublin again with their new piece, which is anything but sedentary.

The chairs "are what links us, what separates us", San Martin explains. "They would be our alphabet, and at the same time something that makes us mute, and the weight of them forces us to be very coherent, because you cannot move them the way you move yourself. They weigh seven kilos each, and it takes the time it takes."

Throughout the piece, she and Mazliah build and dissemble lines and walls of chairs, stacking them, sitting on them, weaving around and underneath them, pouncing from one to the next. Their attempts to escape each other in the piece are inhibited by their three-dimensional labyrinth of chairs - a spindly web of their own construction in which both are irreversibly tangled.

The chairs serve as an essential outside, indifferent and architectural element in a piece that takes as its departure point the double-bind theory on schizophrenia posited by anthropologist Gregory Bateson. Chekroun, Mazliah and San Martin's production works as a graphic illustration of the kind of obsessive, repetitive and emotionally crippling communication that serves as a foundation for this mental disorder - but, disconcertingly, also exists commonly in relationships of all kinds.

"Bateson's double-bind theory is a dynamic situation," says Chekroun. "You can find that sort of relation, that sort of communication network in a schizophrenic family, but you can also find it in normal life. We all live with double binds, modes of communication, without being schizophrenic."

First published in 1972, Bateson's work The Criteria of Mind outlines the conditions that form the double bind: contradictory injunctions or emotional messages (such as love being expressed verbally yet hate in non-verbal behaviour), an inability to clarify the communication or to leave the environment in which it takes place, and the punishment meted out to the recipients when they are unable to fulfil the communication's instructions - which is impossible, as they are contradictory.

Working together in an equal collaboration - as these three have - to express a relationship that enslaves and cripples the psyche must have seemed emotionally claustrophobic yet also enlightening. The focus of the piece particularly concentrated attention on the search for new modes of communication and a new creative process.

"We wanted to interrogate ourselves on how we communicate, and how we work together in our little collective," explains Chekroun. "How do we exchange information, and how do the others understand the information?" And on blind voyages of discovery, interesting things frequently materialise: they realised "how misunderstanding is very important in a creative process".

The urge to find a new creative process, in fact, provided the impetus for the group to get together. To complete her dissertation, Chekroun travelled from the Sorbonne in Paris to Frankfurt to observe the internationally renowned choreographer William Forsythe, then director of Ballett Frankfurt, at work. There she met dancers Mazliah and San Martin, both of whom were members of Ballett Frankfurt and are now part of the smaller William Forsythe Company, which he created out of the ashes of Ballett Frankfurt in 2005.

Originally from San Sebastian in Spain, San Martin has been working with Forsythe for 14 years and, while "it's a very good business card, in another way there are a lot of expectations". In events organised by the company to encourage emerging choreographers, Mazliah and San Martin both came up with individual works in 2001 and 2002. In 2003, however, they decided to work together, and asked Chekroun to come on board.

The collaboration proved very fruitful for all parties. Mazliah, who came originally from Geneva to join Forsythe in 1997, welcomed "the ability to get to work with people on the same basis, with no hierarchy," he says. "We questioned our background - what is dance? Why do we want to make performances?" Answering these questions is not the point; they serve only as catalyst for interrogation. "We are looking for things," he says. "To give answers or definitions would be pretentious."

Having a non-dancer as part of the team felt enriching. "I think the fact that we could work with Chekroun in a different way, with her questions coming from another environment, made us think differently," explains San Martin. "And her way of being physical is very interesting for us, because as dancers we've trained our bodies so much - and our minds, because you cannot separate one from the other - they've become like a machine. And we forgot sometimes how to behave as normal human beings."

While Mazliah and San Martin were shedding their physical habits, Chekroun shrugged off her academic ones. "We all had the same questions concerning how you perform today on stage," she explains, "or how far can you undo your habits, and your knowledge. I don't know if I could say we are using any kind of choreographic technique to work. I think we are trying to avoid technique."

The result was their first piece, Remote Versions, which they performed in Limerick and in Dublin as part of the Fringe Festival in 2004. It dealt with themes such as separation and touch, so led easily into the choreographic discourse that was to become Double B(l)ind. Although starting out with Bateson's theory, the piece went off on a new tangent, hence the parenthetical L in the title. "It's a study about this impossible relationship in a way where being face-to-face is always avoided, where there is always distance," says San Martin. "And if there is touching, it's always in an indirect way.

"We were questioning how far you can be blind to the other, or even blind to yourself," Chekroun explains further. "And Jone and Fabrice, most of the time on stage they don't even see each other. They are totally obsessed by their work, and their work is making lines, building lines, building and building, and trying to escape from one another."

This is where the chairs come in. With all the constant building and dismantling, Chekroun sees echoes of the myth of Sisyphus - or of a "ritournelle", a refrain that keeps coming back.

"This piece indicates an irreversible process," Chekroun remarks. "You cannot go backwards. It's something that is repeated endlessly, and is ineffective in a way: this mobility generates stillness, because in fact they are not moving. Through movement, finally, they are immobile."

"One knows how it will start and how it will eventually develop or end," says San Martin. "If there is an end."

For their own creative purposes, Chekroun, Mazliah and San Martin hope their work together will not have an end, even though they are currently scattered across Europe. "At the moment it's harder," says Mazliah, "but we're very faithful. We don't know where it's going to go, but we like the challenge, what we give to each other. We like not to agree."

• Double B(l)ind is at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Trinity College Dublin, on Fri and Sat. Booking: 01-6082461