Annie Warburton is working with us to evaluate Theatre Sandbox this year. Her first task for us (which I am terribly late on) is to answer some questions, which i thought I would share:

What most excites me about Theatre Sandbox is working with bright people with huge ideas. Many of the projects include technology areas that we haven’t done much work in before and this presents some great opportunities to widen our knowledge and networks. And everyone (participants, advisers, Arts Council and people I explain the scheme to) seem incredibly willing for it to work.

However, I am pretty scared by the enormity of the task. It is beginning to dawn how little time there is, how big the ideas are and how much more technical support is needed than some of our previous projects. We need to be careful to not wear out the good will of our mentors by asking too much, and also not to blow the technology budget too early!

As we have said before, the scheme uses peer-to-peer knowledge sharing mechanisms (this blog/social media/events and dinners) we have used before in Media Sandbox. I am curious now to see whether inter-project collaboration/knowledge sharing will take place – and whether we will have to evolve the model – as the commissions are geographically and thematically spread.

My hopes at this stage? That we can balance the inevitable need to show and document the projects (in order to secure future partners and run the scheme again ) with a sense of freedom and open-ness that does not demand fixed or tiresome outputs.

The success of Theatre Sandbox can and will be judged on many things, and its best to take the long view on the effects of research and development projects on practice and medium. However I am personally hoping that the venues and commissions (at least some anyway) will continue to work together in the future. That we continue to support and learn from the people involved in the commissions, and (most of all) that the participants feel they have had support and care for themselves and their ideas.