If you were to pass a bunch of colorfully-dressed human figures crammed into a crawlspace beneath a public staircase, you might think they’re mannequins at first, with their splayed limbs and claustrophobic positioning. The bodies are bent every which way, some hanging upside down, all of their faces obscured by hoodies, their positioning absurd. As you walk down the street, you spot more and more of them – folded beneath park benches, dangling from staircase railings, squeezed between utility boxes or piled on top of one another. But then a hand moves, or a muscle twitches, and you realize they’re alive.

The brilliance of choreographer Cie. Willi Dorner’s ‘Bodies in Urban Spaces’ lies as much in the chosen setting as it does in the extraordinary flexibility of his performers. Dressed in vivid track suits, the performers quickly assemble themselves into position, hold their poses for an uncomfortably long duration, and then disassemble themselves to run ahead to the next spot and repeat the process. The temporary urban interventions leave no trace when the performance is over, and aim to encourage residents to experience their cities in a different way.

‘Bodies in Urban Spaces’ has been traveling the world since 2007, showing up all over the UK and Europe as well as Texas, New York, Istanbul, Russia and Japan. The performers lead an audience through each city, highlighting various architectural and urban features and how we interact with them as human bodies.

“‘Bodies in Urban Spaces’ is a temporary intervention in diversified urban architectonical environment,” says Dorner. “The intention of ‘Bodies in Urban Spaces’ is to point out the urban functional structure and to uncover the restricted movement possibilities and behavior as well as rules and limitations. By placing the bodies in selected spots the interventions provoke a thinking process and produce irritation. Passers by, residents and audience are motivated and prompted to reflect their urban surrounding and their own movement behavior and habits.”

The first-person perspective seen on this video of two dancers vaulting effortlessly off the side of Oakland’s City Hall building might make you a little dizzy. Secured to the 18-story structure’s roof with safety lines, the duo run, flip and seemingly fly, captured from various angles that can be a tad disorienting.

The pair are members of the Bandaloop vertical choreography dance company, which staged the performance for the Art + Soul Festival in Oakland, California. GoPro cameras capture the action in all its elegance.

The company aims to “re-imagine dance,” performing these seemingly weightless feats on skyscrapers, bridges, billboards, cliffs and historical sights. Says founder and artistic director Amelia Rudolph, “They say what we do is death-defying. I’d say it’s life-affirming.”

The images and the videos of the performances are breathtaking, particularly those of dancers rappelling off the 217-foot Santiago Calatrava ‘Sundial Bridge’ in Redding, seen above. Check them all out at the Bandaloop website.

With their stacks upon stacks of random objects like boxes, bottles and other goods, perhaps there’s nowhere better to experiment with urban camouflage than a big-box retail store like IKEA, Home Depot or Costco. Inspired by snipers’ ‘ghillie suits’, urban camouflage performance artists Sabina Keric and Yvonne Bayer hide in plain sight in surprisingly effective costumes.

“The commercial space is a clean and untouched area. Usually there are no artistic activities. The customer expects nothing out of ordinary in a world of brands and price labels. Our project exceeds the limit and enters the world of commerce without any permission,” the duo writes on their website.

“We chose the big superstores because of the extreme range of goods, the flashing monitors and the large salesrooms. The camouflaged person blends into the surrounding. He or she can disappear for one moment and gets the possibility to merge with the supermarket to defend from the noise of commerce.”

The reaction from employees, store management and customers varied from laughter and delight to aversion and anger, with some not even noticing that anything was out of place. But surprisingly, most customers didn’t even blink an eye when a pile of boxes or leather gloves got up and began walking.

Of course, urban camouflage isn’t limited to shocking performances in retail stores. From cars painted to blend perfectly into their environments to soda machine suits designed to evade stalkers, urban camo ranges from serious artistic statements to the purely bizarre.