The Greenwich+Docklands International Festival closed on Sunday after staging dozens of outdoor performances across east and south-east London under the theme We Move — a celebration of the resilience of Londoners facing the challenges of city life.

The festival opened on 21 August in Woolwich, where General Gordon Square became a dancefloor for 360, Mehdi Kerkouche's exhilarating collision of choreography and electronic music, performed on a circular stage.

Denmark's Uppercut Dance Theater appeared twice in the programme. In Benched, five performers perched, tumbled and rested on a row of benches at the Olympic Park, making the simple act of sitting down precarious. The company's acrobatic vocabulary turned street furniture into a site of risk and repose.

Fabla Collective's Do Birds Dream of Flying? ran at Greenwich Fair on 22 and 23 August, with performers grappling with a rotating ladder. Space, time and gravity were set into motion in Inertie by Underclouds Cie, a French contemporary circus company founded in 2011.

At Greenwich Peninsula, Lucuna Acuña's collaborators Luciana Acuña and Alejo Moguillansky transformed the site into a live film set for Efectos Especiales (Special Effects), blurring the boundary between cinema and performance.

History resurfaced in Romford, where Variable Matter's Meet Me by the Fountain reanimated a fountain that had disappeared from the town through light, sound and projection. The work drew on 779 years of memories from Romford Market.

In Kokkon, a collaboration between Grensgeval and Aifoon, audiences travelled through the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park alongside a man searching for lightness — and were called on to help carry his load.

Last Friday and Saturday, the voices of local residents accompanied audiences into the woods at the Tump 53 nature reserve in Thamesmead. Canopy, by the Lorna Rees Company, wove together sound, music, storytelling and design in an exploration of our relationship with trees.

Saturday at the Olympic Park brought two further works. Fuse Theatre's Man Down combined hip-hop, beatboxing, live music and "visual vernacular" to explore toxic masculinity and the weight of expectation. In Vero Cendoya's Cicatrius, bodies collided, were lifted and came together in a work drawing on ancient traditions from Sardinia and Catalonia, turning scars into symbols of strength and transformation.

The festival closed with Luca Silvestrini's Protein, which brought together professional dancers and local communities for (In)Visible Dancing — a finale that mirrored the event's founding premise: the city itself, and the people who move through it, as the performers.

All images from the festival were photographed by David Levene for the Guardian. With free outdoor work spanning Woolwich, Thamesmead, Romford, Greenwich and the Olympic Park, the festival continues to make the case that large-scale performance belongs in public space — and that its next edition will be watched as a bellwether for outdoor arts funding in the capital.