Look closely at the individual items in the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art (GI) guide, and the prospect of involvement – watching a live performance or being invited to participate – will frequently catch your eye.

And "looking closely" is the key element of a GI co-commission with London's Chisenhale Gallery and the Centre d'Art de Bretigny. A Piece Danced Alone, created by Alexandra Bachzetsis, will be performed at Glasgow's CCA for two nights next week.

A cursory glance at Bachzetsis's CV lists a dynamic roster of solo achievements and high-end collaborations with, among others, Sasha Waltz & Guests and Les Ballets C de la B. Her professional background embraces theatre, dance and visual arts, and since she started making and showing work, she has picked up a stream of awards across Europe.

Frankly, on paper, she looks a tad daunting. But in person, perched on a sofa in a Glasgow hotel, Bachzetsis proves so willing to discuss the how and why of what she does – astute analysis giving way to merry laughter, personal anecdote morphing into intellectual reflection – that hours speed by unnoticed. If anything is daunting, it's the scope of her ideas and the challenges she sets herself in bringing them into a performance before an audience.

One of the first things she says flags up the humanity that underpins even the most abstracted aspects of her work: "I think I have always been fascinated by people, by how relationships function –privately, socially – and how cultural backgrounds influence and affect that. I'm interested in how gesture mutates from one context into another, and can acquire different meanings, be interpreted differently by different cultures even.

"On a very simple level, actually, I know this from my own family structure. I am from a Greek and a Swiss background, and have grown up knowing there are huge gaps and differences in the movement, languages, behaviour, 'codes' they use."

She pauses, then, with a smile and a shrug, adds: "I belong to both cultures – yet I feel a stranger in both. So for a time there is this thing of 'not belonging', but then there comes a moment when you realise this can be a powerful position. Maybe something you can explore, develop into a strength. Make the 'not belonging' the beginning of awareness about what you, yourself, want to represent. What is it you want to be? What can you pass on? What is it you can take from your background? Once you start looking into yourself, you become sensitive to other people, other cultures and contexts."

And so began Bachzetsis's impulse to look closer at everyday people and their behaviour codes. Rigorously observing, analysing, extracting visual elements and movement tics from all kinds of genres and contexts, then working them into gallery installations or live performances where onlookers would be confronted by, as it were, themselves, but with such a considered focus that audiences were drawn into looking closer: questioning the genre-codes and their own responses.

She describes one project in which pole-dancing was at the centre of the piece. "I had a mirror wall, so the audience were confronting themselves as they were watching. But I put the girls in very plain Calvin Klein underwear and classic high heels – nothing exotic, because I wanted to show the physical technique of this acrobatic act. For me, this was about a journey. About how – depending on context – what is basically 'red-light district' entertainment mutates into the fitness studio and then the high-art gallery space, and how that perhaps gives audiences a different permission to be voyeuristic. Which is something I hope they would think about afterwards."

There's a chuckle as she says this, but even when she laughs, or makes self-deprecating comments, there's never any doubt that her work is rooted in profound issues of identity, culture and what she often refers to as "duality" – the parallel states we all inhabit, with our own internalised feelings and instincts having to co-exist with the external structures, rules and routines of our everyday surroundings.

"It's a bit like the personal/internal conflicts I have about my work," she says. "Who is it for? How far do I want to be entertaining? Yes, I want to reach people who have the capacity to analyse what I do – but I like it that my grandmother in Greece can understand it without reading any research because she understands a lot about people, codes and movement. So there is a love/hate tug. But, actually, I think my spiritual home is in the field of tension, that there is energy for me in the conflict. If I did just one or just the other, I would get terribly bored, I'm sure."

A Piece Danced Alone will tease audience perceptions of what they see – or think they see – during a series of solos that pass from one body to another, the live moment often shared by video material that may or may not be happening in the same time-frame.

"It does play with people's assumptions and expectations, which is something we do in everyday life. We all look for the 'codes' in someone's behaviour, but we also have options, ways of disguising ourselves or putting on different identities. We do it all the time. You just have to look closer and ask yourself 'what it is I see?' and sometimes 'what is it I don't see?'. Really, it's about finding meaning in what we often overlook, finding also those possibilities of expression that are beyond the written word."

A Piece Danced Alone is at the CCA, Glasgow, on April 25 and 26.