LONDON — In the middle of a summer that, even by British standards, rather spectacularly resembles winter, audiences last weekend saw two outdoor spectacles that were a central part of the public art arm of the London 2012 festival, the cultural run-up to the Olympic Games.
Spectators gazed at the sky in nervous anticipation of rain as 1,000 performers lined up on Saturday afternoon for Big Dance Trafalgar Square. Directed by Wayne McGregor, it was the culmination of Big Dance 2012, an eight-day country-wide festival of community dance involving hundreds of thousands of people and taking place in shopping centers, schools, playgrounds, public squares, parks, streets and anywhere else you can think of. (There was also a Big Dance Bus.)
For the Trafalgar Square event, the participants — amateurs except for a handful of members of Mr. McGregor’s Random Dance Company — came from 30 dance groups from all over London. They had trained with Mr. McGregor’s dancers at five Big Dance “hubs” throughout the city, and Mr. McGregor put the pieces together for the 45-minute show, set to a commissioned score (admirably non-thumpy) by Scanner and Joel Cadbury.
The event was predictably heart-warming, with young and old, people of all races, and several wheelchair-bound participants moving in fluid groups into the center of the square to perform sequences based on sports (running, judo, discus, gymnastics and hurdling among them) while huge screens around the square showed closeups of the dancers and archive footage from the Olympic Games.
At the end, all of the performers surged into the square to dance a final sequence together. But bravo to Mr. McGregor for keeping this to the finale, and resisting the impulse to create a big, military formation. He managed the extremely difficult task of keeping the eye engaged on a large scale, as groups moved in and out of the center, and on a smaller one too, as individuals emerged from groups, or his own dancers performed lovely brief duos. Thousands of spectators applauded lustily at the end, then raised their eyes apprehensively to the skies. The rain was holding off.
And it continued to hold off on Sunday, when Elizabeth Streb, the daredevil American choreographer whose work blends circus skills, dance, gymnastics and sheer insanity, staged “One Extraordinary Day,” an event commissioned by the mayor of London, over a year in the planning, and involving performances by her Streb Extreme Action Company members at seven London landmarks. The event had been widely publicized, but the date kept secret, with the idea of surprising an unsuspecting public.
The secrecy seemed a little pointless at 7:30 on Sunday morning, when most of the people gathered to watch the Streb performers bungee-jump off Millennium Bridge, in front of the Tate Modern, were journalists and photographers. The only onlookers who seemed at all surprised were a few bemused joggers.
Still, the bungee-jumpers were a fine sight, launching themselves into space as the bells of St. Paul’s Cathedral struck the half-hour, and just as the sun emerged with cinematic improbability. Later that morning, Ms. Streb, in gold boots and her trademark black outfit, with two of her performers, walked down the curving glass side of City Hall. At midday they were behind St. Paul’s, spinning on a gigantic hamster wheel, and in the afternoon, the impassive lions of Trafalgar Square were once again ignoring humans doing odd things, this time balancing on and jumping off a rotating metal ladder, and, later, a large scaffold.
The performers flew through the air with the greatest of ease; they turned upside down, balanced on their hands, spun in the air and fell with pancake-flat horizontal bodies to a thick mat below. A huge crowd ooh-ed and aah-ed as red London buses passed by, but the Streb company’s greatest moment came in the “Extraordinary Day” finale, as 32 performers hung off the spokes of the enormous Ferris wheel (almost 400 feet high) that is the London Eye. It was a moving sight, the tiny fearless humans, the huge structure, the London sky — both surprising and extraordinary.