Today Thursday 22 April is Earth Day, which this year has the theme ‘Restore our Earth’.

So it is appropriate that Inside Out Dorset, the biennial international arts festival, has chosen today to announce its return this autumn in five locations across the county.

Hosted by Dorchester-based outdoor arts producers Activate events will take place over two weekends in September.

From Friday 17 to Sunday 19 September, Inside Out Dorset is working with Forestry England and Dorset Council at Moors Valley Country Park and Forest at Ashley Heath where it will stage Luke Jerram’s remarkable installation Gaia. This is 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.

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.

In Poole, Isobel Jobbins hosts her walking tour, The Collective Memory Archive; and in Christchurch there’s also a new work by Fingerprint Dance and Dorset Youth Theatre present a work inspired by Hardy’s Tess with further performances from The Remix East and Pavilion Dance South West’s youth dance project, COAST.

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 installation will be accompanied by an artwork trail of events and performances including three world premieres that explore climate change and our future use of the land.

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.