We are delighted to announce the six recipients of this year’s Theatre Sandbox commissions, supported by Arts Council England.

Each of the six successful recipients receives £10,000 to develop their groundbreaking projects at prestigious partner venues across the country ready for public events and testing in September. This will be followed by a final showcase event at Watershed in November.

Theatre Sandbox seeks to grow an active community of experimentation and learning and includes a structured programme of commissioning and knowledge exchange to grow awareness of technology in the theatre sector. IShed aims to encourage innovation and to leave a lasting legacy as part of the scheme.

Analogue’s Beachy Head. Photo by Geraint Lewis.

The commissions were selected following an intensive application period, during which 275 theatre makers attended nationwide introductory workshops and almost 100 applications were received.

The commissions:

Proto-type Theater
Hosted by Bristol Old Vic
Fortnight is a two-week long performance experience located in the spaces, technologies and occurrences of our daily lives: an unfolding adventure into the limitless ‘local’.
Proto-type Theater is a company of multi-disciplinary artists interested in live and digital performance. Proto-type has created demanding, intricately crafted original works, differing in scale, subject and medium for a diverse audience of intelligent, modern humans. FFI www.proto-type.org

Mind the Gap
Hosted by Contact, Manchester
Mind the Gap will make a sonic maze where the audience are moved through a space, attracted and repulsed by sirens. Mind the Gap makes professional theatre with learning disabled people. FFI www.mind-the-gap.org.uk

Analogue
Hosted by The Junction, Cambridge
Analogue will use 21st century connectedness to explore disconnections between ourselves in the present, and the semi-remembered events of our childhood. The audience will navigate through events in May 1985, beginning with a phone call that has long since vanished from history.
Analogue aims to produce challenging, highly inventive via theatrical traditions from the past.FFI www.analogueproductions.co.uk

Ed Collier & Melanie Wilson
Hosted by Lyric Hammersmith
The Observatory is an audio led adventurous fairy tale for children aged between 7 and 10 and their adults. Staged both on a high street and in a theatrical playspace it is about a parallel magical world that exists alongside the city. It can be heard only by those who want to hear it and glimpsed through keyholes and cracks in the pavement by a lucky few. The Observatory will be made Ed Collier of China Plate and award winning theatre and sound artist Melanie Wilson.
FFI www.chinaplatetheatre.com / www.melaniewilson.org.uk

Tin Bath
Hosted by mac, Birmingham
Sophie Woolley and Gemma Fairlie of Tin Bath are developing a new comedy called You’re So Happy I Want to Die. The project experiments with dynamic, evocative captioning that responds to the live nature of theatre. Tin Bath produces exciting interactive theatre that is accessible to deaf and hard of hearing people. FFI www.tinbaththeatre.com

Duncan Speakman & Uninvited Guests
Hosted by Soho Theatre, London
Duncan Speakman is an artist who creates experiences in public spaces, often using mobile audio technology. He is collaborating with Uninvited Guests, a Bristol based company whose recent work blurs the line between theatre and social festivities. Together they are exploring how audiences can collectively imagine utopian futures in real locations using performance and networked maps
FFI www.duncanspeakman.net / www.uninvited-guests.net

Theatre Sandbox is originated and produced by iShed, part of Watershed. It is supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, and delivered in partnership with Bristol Old Vic, Soho Theatre Lyric, Hammersmith, mac, Contact and The Junction.