Parade – The Giant Wheel

A large-scale travelling performance featuring a Giant Wheel powered by 5 performers and a community cast of local participants celebrating individual identities whilst honouring our shared life struggles.

Parade – The Giant Wheel is a moving performance inspired by the beauty, power, and impact of people from different walks of life coming together, featuring a 12-foot tall Giant Wheel powered by 5 street artists and accompanied by music and a large community cast of local groups and individual performers.

Autin Dance Theatre uses their unique blend of contemporary storytelling, striking physicality and innovative large designs to transport audiences and communities along a carefully choreographed procession.

The 50-minute itinerant act is punctuated by 3 static moments that celebrate the tension and fracture between our individual identities and our shared collective humanity. Ultimately, Parade is about celebrating different journeys whilst honouring our shared life struggles.

The Giant Wheel carries the performers high above the streets, spins them around ferociously, turning their worlds upside down, at times giving them momentum and speed, and at others rocking them gently back and forth imitating the laborious and repetitive cycle of life.

Parade is an ambitious and scalable street performance that has inclusivity and accessibility at its heart. Local participants can join Parade’s community engagement plans including opportunities for groups to perform alongside the procession and for individuals to join the large-scale movement of mass participation.

Developed in 2023, Parade – The Giant Wheel has toured and continues to tour extensively across the UK. The show has visited 10 festivals so far, performing to more than 16,000 live audiences.

Autin Dance Theatre (ADT) is an innovative touring dance company, established in 2013 under the helm of acclaimed French choreographer & Birmingham-based Artistic Director Johnny Autin. Our mission is to inspire, educate and instigate positive social changes by delivering relevant, highly responsive, multi-disciplinary arts activities to communities, in theatres, outdoors and in non-traditional spaces. ADT provides extensive learning & engagement programmes with a wide range of participants across several local communities.

ADT draws on contemporary social issues (environment, community, relationships, identities) to make engaging, highly accessible and relevant performance work. ADT uses our unique blend of contemporary storytelling, striking physicality, and innovative large designs to transport audiences and communities along carefully choreographed moving outdoor processions and static performances.

The company is a collaborative ensemble of creatives who devise and produce socially engaged and mass participatory movement performance projects across the UK & internationally. We have built a strong reputation with high levels of engagement for our work with critically acclaimed productions including A Posi+ive Life,Dystopia, Square One, Street Games &Out of the Deep Blue. In 2023, we have premiered our brand-new spectacle Parade – The Giant Wheel.

‘Totally brilliant for our Basingstoke audiences and the community element is possibly the best participatory element to a show we have had during the 12 years of the Basingstoke Festival.’

Ross Harvie, Arts and Events Manager (Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council)

‘With a charismatic spirit and great attention to detail, Creative Director Johnny Autin creates not only a striking visual performance of community spirit but one that is accessible to all.’

Serena Murphy (Redbrick)

‘Happy, Joyful, Included, I felt part of the community.’

Participant from Saint Giles Church of England Primary School

‘Parade is the embodiment of a carefully created outdoor performance – it fuses circus, dance, procession and engineering into a show that reaches out to audiences with a high level of spectacle and scale alongside more intimate moments which directly engage with spectators; crowds always love a parade and this is a very different ambulatory experience.’

Angus MacKechnie, Director (OutdoorArtsUK)