I am sitting at a table for two in a café on Pearse Street. Across from me, my boyfriend is wearing headphones and gazing deep into my eyes. When he speaks he sounds assured, half philosopher, half poet. A voice in his ear is feeding him his lines. If only real life were this tightly scripted.

Directed by the voices in our ears we shape plasticine heads onto tiny plastic figures and move them across the stage (which is actually the table but we keep forgetting this). Doing what I'm told, I draw a door with chalk so my character can leave her lover. My boyfriend drips red liquid into my glass of water. I drink the "blood".

The other people in the café go about their coffee drinking and cake eating business oblivious to the drama being played out between us. When it is all over we walk out, feeling as though we've been through an emotional mangle. Just the thing to spice up an otherwise boring Wednesday night.

Etiquette, the half hour show that is part of the Outer Space segment of the Fringe programme this year, is a treat for the senses that should not be missed by anyone who appreciates the blurring - in this case the obliteration - of the lines between audience and performer. Set in churches, disused buildings, bars, stairwells, galleries, hotel rooms and schools, these productions show us what is possible when we take theatre out of the cosy confines of more conventional spaces.

Twenty years ago I had my first taste of what might best be described as 'theatre outside of the theatre' when I featured in a Dublin Youth Theatre production of Sean O'Casey's The Plough and The Stars. The action took place in a quasitenement building on Gardiner Street before moving out into the streets which were done up in 1916 slum style. I was a Salvation Army woman on the street, noisily god bothering passing members of the audience. The play was a huge success with punters and not just because the interval took place in a pub.

I've been a sucker for what is often dubbed 'site-specific' work ever since. My personal highlight of a previous Fringe was Tom Swift's Drive By. The truth is I've forgotten much of the theatre I've seen while sitting in comfortable seats watching actors performing a safe distance away on stage. I will, however, never forget driving into the Power Station at Ringsend, getting my windscreen wiped, tuning in the car radio and being bombarded, while still sitting in the car, by that relentlessly visceral 25-minuteglimpse inside the mind of a boy racer. I haven't thought about 'joy riding' the same way since.

During Fringe Festivals past I could mostly be found hanging out at The Personality Café, an ever-changing happening which fed into my desire as an audience member to be surprised, stimulated and catapulted from my comfort zone. I expect nothing less from the Outer Space programme.

So what's in store this year? In Rock Paper Scissors you sit at a school desk - a captive audience of one - to experience the cross pollination of visual art, theatre and dance. Down on Burgh Quay, a bouncer takes your invite before you enter a daydream belonging to The Woman Who Left Herself. Only three people across the whole festival will get to experience Paranoid which will whisk them across the city on a whacked out journey where nothing is as it seems. You can experience the sensory thrill of being both audience and performer with Drinking Dust, the Outer Space offering from the always-brilliant Junk Ensemble, directed by Brokentalkers. In Love and Other Disguises, you'll be the audience and congregation at a wedding in the Unitarian Church.

Elsewhere, four young writers from Dublin Youth Theatre use the company's house on Gardiner Street to explore reality in We're Not Real. While It's A Domestic is dinner as performance art with Maedbh Cheasty from You're Only Massive inviting us on a culinary trip down memory lane.

With any luck I will catch them all but the one I'm most tickled by is Storytaker by Patrick Bridgeman, an exploration of identity set in the stairwell of a performance art space where the audience is given the power to decide the outcome of the story.

Lately, there's been some soulsearching about the definition of "site specific". Purists say it is "performance specifically generated from or for one site". I'm not convinced. La Voix Humaine, one woman's experience of being dumped on the phone, was not written by Jean Cocteau to be performed in the James Joyce Centre, but this space is guaranteed to inform and enhance what is expected to be one of the highlights of Fringe.

Site-specific. Site-enhanced. Site-generic. Site-sympathetic. These productions deserve better than hyphenated labels. In the end, wherever and however it takes place, this is theatre. Exciting, challenging, amusing, uplifting, uncomfortable, exhilarating theatre. Go see for yourself.

Roisín Ingle is a freelance journalist