Four St Kilda homes become makeshift theatres as Unknown Neighbours come calling

Lee's productions are typically restless affairs that shrug off the confines of the black box and instead unfold in hotel rooms, street crossings or public squares. When they do take place in a conventional theatre, they're more likely to be concerned with the character and history of the venue itself.

Ranters, too, has long eschewed the greasepaint artifice of theatre in favour of something more direct. You don't go to a Ranters show to find characters or settings or even plot – the actors are simply themselves, their dialogue developed through intensive improvisation but delivered in uncontrived fashion.

Both are compelled by the truth that can be found in the most ordinary of places. "Everything happens through everyday life," Lee says. "Even evolution happens through everyday life."

Unknown Neighbours has already enjoyed an iteration in Seoul, where audiences walked the streets of a built-up area that featured a football stadium, three theatres, a gallery and a massive church.

"All of these institutions were connected to fundamental aspects of living in some way," Cortese says. But when they began exploring the streets of St Kilda, they found that the largely residential neighbourhood was mostly offering back the blank facades of apartment blocks. You've really got to get in there, they realised, and so they began hunting for homes.

There's a Korean word that's hard to translate: salim used to refer to household chores, but over the past few decades has come to signify the way your domestic set-up has its own inner life.

"[It] means to make things alive," Lee says. "We call how you put your furniture and how you clean things and everything salim. To see someone's house, how they're living and how they think, you need to see how they're doing their salim. These are very daily actions but somehow it projects one's values and ways of thinking."

The four houses of Unknown Strangers won't be made over as theatre sets, then, but will retain the salim of those who live there. Cortese and Lee have handed each apartment over to a different performer who is developing their own response to the space, and what it triggers in them.

Korean performer Kyungmin Na is performing in Cortese's home, which reminds him of a past relationship, and the way the home environment was one of the reasons behind its dissolution. Long-term Ranters member Beth Buchanan has just been through her own break-up, and working in a stranger's home echoes the way that her own home is now a stranger, and that her new life has forced her to find new furniture, new utensils, new friends.

"The Korean artists were interested in the insides of the house because normally when you're touring it's not really easy to see into someone's real house, where their life has been accumulating for a long time," Lee says.

"Because many things are already there in the house, we're trying to find a way to make the space itself reveal something. Of course the performers will operate things but we're not focusing on the performer's body or emotions. We try to create a distance so we can find out how the environment around us tells its story."

Ranters and VaQi don't really do "plays" but even by their usual standards, this is even less traditional. Performers might text via handheld projectors or stop to play a game.

"Someone described it as a personal essay using text and light and images," Cortese says. "Theatre's a very broad term and for us it's still theatre but it's probably more akin to some kind of performance art."

"I don't define theatre as a form of art that is fixed," Lee says. "Sometimes in Korea I don't even use the word theatre. But in general I don't see it as a fixed form. The essential point is how we share the same intense presence with the audience."

Unknown Neighbours is being presented as part of the third biennial Festival of Live Art, which often focuses on the relationship between art and audience. In this case, audiences will be divided into small groups and will witness just one of the four home performances before being led out to more public spaces that have their own stories to tell. What happens along the way is anyone's guess – that's the nature of live art – but if Lee is looking to collapse the divide between theatre and life, there are worse places to start than the streets of St Kilda. There might even be a role for a dog.

Unknown Neighbours runs March 12-18 at (or near) St Kilda's Theatre Works.