The free, outdoor Greenwich+Docklands International Festival in East London is Burning Man but sleeker and on the Thames. It’s a lavish stadium show but without the stadium to hem it in. Indeed, many of the participants have worked on rock shows and outsized events such as the Olympics. They know how to deliver spectacle to the masses. For the most extreme event, I elect Thaw. A dancer rigged out like a rock climber launches into the air from a 2.5-ton block of ice suspended high above the Thames by crane. Thaw lasts eight hours, during which the ice drip-drips into the river. The solo Touch, by contrast, is poignant in its existentialism. As part of the one-day Dancing City festival-inside-a festival on September 7, Yoann Bourgeois sails between a flight of stairs and a floor of trampoline: an everyman surprised again and again by the good luck of his survival. —Apollinaire Scherr