Inside Out Dorset, the biennial international arts festival, is set to return this autumn in five extraordinary locations across the county hosted by Dorchester-based outdoor arts producers Activate.
Over two weekends in September, each of these special and distinctive landscapes will be animated and transformed by magical art and performances with themes of sustainability, land use and lifecycles, human and environmental.
In the east of the county, from Friday 17 to Sunday 19 September, Inside Out Dorset is working with Forestry England and Dorset Council at the popular Moors Valley Country Park and Forest at Ashley Heath where it will stage Luke Jerram’s remarkable installation Gaia, a seven-metre scale model of Earth using NASA photography that offers an out-of-this-world chance to see our planet as an astronaut would view it from space.
Each centimetre of the artwork represents 18km of Earth’s surface and nestled in the trees for three days Gaia is sure to stir the emotions as we consider climate change and humanity’s effect on the planet.
In Poole and Christchurch, on 18 and 19 September respectively, there’s a full programme of outdoor circus events featuring Cirque Rouages’ Boate in which fabulous acrobatics deliver a powerful political message; Mimbre’s Lifted, a collaboration between choreographers Gary Clarke, Yi-Chun Liu and HURyCAN; Les Grooms’ brass band promenade show La Baronnade; and Catch Me, Upswing’s surprising take on age and gender.
Over the second weekend, from Friday 24 to Sunday 26 September, Inside Out Dorset hosts Luke Jerram’s monumental Gaiain the stunning scenery of the Marshwood Vale on the Symondsbury Estate, near Bridport. The land lies within the Dorset Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, one of the festival’s partner organisations, and includes two of the highest points in Dorset at Lewesdon Hill and Pilsdon Pen.
Meanwhile, Inside Out Dorset’s final weekend also finds two of Europe’s most in-demand outdoor arts companies – Germany’s Dundu and England’s Worldbeaters – collaborating in Sense of Unity, an after-dark parade show in Weymouth fusing visual spectacle with raucous live music. Lead by the high-energy drummers of Worldbeaters playing a soundtrack inspired by world rhythms and the West African kora, the procession goes in search of Baby Dundu who then takes it to find gentle Giant Dundu, handled and steered through the crowd by the talented team of five puppeteers.