Last Wednesday, a few minutes before 6 p.m., Vershawn Sanders of Red Clay Dance Company climbed onto the stage of the Chashama performing arts venue at 217 E. 42nd St., between Second and Third avenues.

She was participating in the 10th annual Oasis Festival, which features dance and performance art. Rather than taking place in a theater, however, performers in the festival stand between the audience (seated in a diminutive black-box auditorium) and the throng of pedestrians bustling along the streets of Midtown. A massive storefront window is all that separates the spectacle from the street. Just as the performers play to these two audiences, so the people in the auditorium see two spectacles: the one onstage and the one beyond it in the street. Office workers, hard hats, vagrants, and tourists gawk in puzzled amazement at the often anarchic events taking place inside.

On this occasion, however, only two minutes into Ms. Sanders’s performance, the audience inside saw something unprecedented. First a few pedestrians, then a stampede, began running eastward past the window, their faces contorted in terror as they glanced backward, over their shoulders, to the west. At once everyone inside became aware of a loud, almost deafening, roar. “I heard a rumbling and I saw people running,” Ms. Sanders, a Chicago native, recalled. “But I blocked it out at first, since I was doing my performance. Then I heard someone shout, ‘Get out of the building! We have to evacuate!’ So I grabbed my belongings from the back and ran out with everyone else.”

A water main had just burst at Lexington Avenue and 41st Street, sending a geyser of asbestos-laden steam hundreds of feet into the Midtown air. Needless to say, no further performances were held that day.

But the next day, promptly at noon, the dancers and performance artists were back doing what they do, what they had done all of last week, and what they will continue doing this week, in the second half of the two-week festival that takes place each weekday between noon and 1 p.m., and between 5:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.

To an admittedly extreme degree, the tumultuous events of last Wednesday underscored the beauty and charm of the Oasis festival, an exuberation of goofiness and creativity. A typical program includes four acts in each of the day’s two shows, which are introduced by emcees such as Amber Alert, a lovely, wisecracking star of neo-burlesque who wears a crimson evening dress and a phosphorescent green wig, and Scottie the Blue Bunny, an exuberant man of 40, well over 6 feet tall even without his 6-inch platforms, who wears a pale blue bunny outfit.

This year’s festival features roughly 25 different acts, ranging from modern dance to political commentary and neo-dadaist exercises. A company that has already performed twice, and was about to perform last Wednesday, Erin Malley’s Malleable Dance Theater, offered a retro-spectacle in which five dancers, each in a different colored wig, perform to classic pop after receiving calls on their cell phones (the numbers are posted inside and outside the auditorium).

Another performer, Kron Vollmer, is a young woman who declared herself the world’s smallest sovereign nation, with her own language, currency, and visas, during her performance at Oasis two years ago. This year she is back with two additional dancers, a video installation, and a personal fragrance.

Other acts include a more conventional solo dance by Patrice Miller, whose props included a chair and a current newspaper that she mangles and tramples upon. Debra Wanner’s riff on domesticity includes her dancing around a picnic she has just set, as she recalls an ancient episode of “The Twilight Zone.”

And, as the audience experienced last Wednesday, one of the distinguishing aspects of the festival is its ability to respond to its surroundings. Though Ms. Sanders never got to perform last Wednesday, and though she was still too scared to show up on Friday, she returned to the stage last night, and is scheduled to perform this evening.