Five-metre high swings are all part of Worthing's free summer Saturday outdoor fun

All or Nothing Aerial Dance Theatre join the Spin Out 2022 season with The Swings on August 13 in Steyne Gardens. Although tickets are free, Worthing Theatres & Museum recommend booking a ticket so they can keep you up to date with any last-minute venue/time changes that may occur due to weather etc.

Spin Out 2022 offers free shows every Saturday until September 10. This week All or Nothing Aerial Dance Theatre head down from Scotland to take centre stage in Worthing. Part performance and part installation, The Swings is both an aerial dance duet and an open invitation for you to swing high and free, all taking place on a magnificent, larger-than-life swing set. There will be a short 15-minute aerial dance performance at regular intervals throughout the day, and the swings will be open for everyone to use in between.

Jen Paterson, from the company, said: “We’ll bring a giant swing set that is just over five metres high and the whole thing is just inspired by swinging, the joy of swinging up and down. That feeling of the motion, that feeling in your stomach of going higher and higher. There are swings in just about every playground and they bring back so many memories, that feeling of the wind in your face and that pleasure of just hanging around with your friends.

“I am an aerialist and also a parent and when I became a parent I was back in the parks and had the excuse to play on the swings again and just to enjoy them. And I just felt that there was something here that I wanted to explore as an aerialist, and to develop this show gave me a great excuse.

"These are 15-minutes shows with two aerialists, everything inspired by being in a swing, and after the show the swings are open to the public. It's great. It is just like being in a park but with these huge swings. I set up the company way back in 2006 and the idea was just to create work merging aerial and dance together. I was more contemporary dance and then I got into the aerial and then we started to make work. It was very much project based for a few years until around 2012 when we started creating more works and becoming busier.”

Fortunately The Swings was the kind of work that worked particularly well during the pandemic when gatherings were allowed only outdoors: “We toured Scotland with it last year. The first three months of the lockdowns were quite hard but as soon as things started to open, we did a lot of teaching and online work as well as doing things like this outdoors. We managed to get through somehow, and I do think people were really keen to get back to performance and also to get back to seeing performances. As soon as the opportunity came along people were really keen to get back out there.”