Victoria Park to be transformed into old fashioned pleasure garden for this weekend's Paradise Garde

PARADISE Gardens is set to transform Victoria Park into a 21st century pleasure garden this weekend with two days of circus, theatre, live music and DJs, dance, outdoor art and children's activities.

Now in its fifth year, the free festival, which last year attracted 65,000 people, will include the London premiere of the Footsbarn Travelling Theatre production Sorry!.

The company has teamed up with Cirque Werdyn for an anarchic show in a big top with clowns and undertakers, actors and tractors, corpses and horses.

Live music, including Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, Movits, Brass Roots, Soul Jazz Orchestra, Jazz Jamaica, Brute Chorus and Yiddish Twist Orchestra, will come from the Paradise Stage while Heart n Soul's Beautiful Octopus Club will showcase music, theatre, dance and art by artists with learning disabilities.

Festival-goers can dance the day and night away in the Electro Ballroom where the London Swing Society and T Mobile's Big Dance will provide the music before handing over to Hoxton club night Electro Swing and Dalston club night Arriba La Cumbia in the evenings.

A show developed with East End boxing clubs, Gloves On, will see young boxers perform in a life sized boxing ring and the weekend will culminate in a pyrotechnic finale over Victoria Park Lake.

The festival will also feature its popular Village Fete, with Victoria Park Books Reading Corner, East End artisans, a creative play area for children and exhibitions as well as Carter's Steam Fair and a market with dozens of stalls selling food and crafts from all over the world.

All events, apart from Footsbarn's production of Sorry!, are free. The festival runs from noon-10pm on Saturday and Sunday.

More information is available at ww.paradisegardensfestival.org.uk

Tickets for Sorry! are available from www.barbican.org.uk