Whether it’s Shakespearean sonnets in a Pizza Express, promenade Pinter or the Palace Pier reimagined as a hellish holiday camp, Hydrocracker has become a byword for innovative, interactive and site-specific theatre.

The award-winning, Brighton-based company is one of several to have been taken under the wing of Brighton Dome and Festival’s Artist Development Programme and given the support and funding to progress further.

At next May’s Festival, the company will unveil How Do You Feel?, an ambitious examination of the future of healthcare that will see the audience thrown into the very heart of the debate.

“One of the big themes of our work is to cast the audience,” explains Hydrocracker director Gem Wall. “We want more than for them to sit in the dark and watch passively. We’ve taken that idea even further with this piece. The audience will be split into six or seven groups and asked to make choices that will influence the journey they take through it. People in the same audience will see completely different scenes to each other – it all relates to this idea of choice.”

Support from the Brighton Dome and Festival, as well as the Arts Council, funded three weeks of research sessions with NHS thinktank The Kings Fund and has allowed the company to trial early scenes in front of a selected audience in disused wards in Brighton General Hospital. It has also allowed it the rare privilege of working with a specially commissioned writer. “That’s a first for us,” says Wall, of Neil Fleming’s involvement. “In the past, we’ve had to work out how to stage an existing work in a particular space. Here, we can tailor it entirely.”

As a further step in the development process, the work is to be shown in Brighton Dome and Festival’s new In Process/In Performance festival – a series of performances, work-in-progress presentations, workshops and discussions that demonstrate the scope of work the venue is helping to nurture. Wall admits the performance may bear little resemblance to the show premiered next May. “It’s a great chance for us to see what works and what doesn’t. We’ll be making notes throughout and that early audience response will feed into the eventual shape of the piece.”

Other shows within the In Process bracket include the third instalment in Joe Bone’s award-winning Fringe hit Bane, a hilarious genre-parody inspired by hard-boiled detectives and classic film noir, avant-garde dance duo The Two Wrongies’ World Of Wrong and acclaimed theatre company Told By An Idiot’s And The Horse You Rode In On. Plus there’s an opportunity to see truly embryonic works by Brighton talents including Rachel Blackman, Ross Gurny-Randall and Prodigal Theatre at the Dome’s first Scratch Night.

At the other end of the spectrum is the Jasmin Vardimon Company, whose latest work 7734, developed in association with the Brighton Dome and Festival, will have its world premiere during In Process/In Performance, before touring across the world. Vardimon, who began a three-year partnership with the Dome and Festival in 2007, premiered sell-out successes Yesterday and Justitia in the Corn Exchange, and now moves to the Dome Concert Hall for 7743, which uses her characteristic blend of dance, text, video and music to question the human forces and weaknesses that have manufactured hell on earth, while simultaneously highlighting our capacity for survival.

Workshops include a four-day European aerial dance forum, under-18s hip-hop dance workshop with Zoo Nation (whose Some Like It Hip Hop gets an early outing at the Pavilion Theatre earlier in the festival) and a contemporary dance workshop with the Jasmin Vardimon Company.

* Various dates, times and prices. Visit www.brightondome.org or call 01273 709709.