Hide&Seek is working with Amitesh Grover & theatre artists in the UK & Delhi to curate and produce a dual location Sandpit. A group of artists & players will gather to play a set of social games and playful experiences in Delhi, and a group of players & artists will gather at the National Theatre. Each group will be 'present' at the other event through a variety of digital connections: through Skype, email, SMS, Facebook, Flickr etc.
The games will encourage collaboration and play across these digital connections and invite both groups to form relationships with players in the other location.
Our desire is to transform the properties of a cultural space through play and through a digital window onto another place, using the wifi and 3G networks within both spaces to forge multiple connections between the two locations. Ultimately, the goal of this experimentation is to invite theatre artists to use game design to invent new kinds of digital collaboration, intimacy and connectedness.
The UK theatre artists who will collaborate to devise the UK element of the project are Coney, Present Attempt and Stoke Newington International Airport. All three companies have agreed to work in partnership and share ideas collaboratively. Amitesh Grover, in Delhi, will collaborate with Delhi based artists and architects to create games and co-ordinate the Indian part of the event. 
We have a pool of 4-5 social games that embrace questions of mapping & territory, devise unlikely ways for players to communicate, and invite consideration of the physical, digital and social environment of each space – the differences and similarities between them. Our small playtest in May revealed how people in Delhi and London respond in surprising ways to discovering each other and their cities through the games. 
We seek to provide a supported context to participants of these two cities to consider this emerging practice and to provide ways for social gaming and interactive theatre to infiltrate the Performance artistic scene.
This event is produced in partnership with the National Theatre and LIFT and supported by the British Council.