It’s universal, our delight with things optical illusion.

On 8 марта (March 8), International Women’s Day in Russia, these ladies performed a clever little optical illusion number to the delight of the entire audience. Click the photo to see the video.

As you can see, each costume is half black and half white.  The left half of one paired with the right half of its neighbor creates the illusion of whole solid-color people with extraordinary abilities of levitation.

It calls to mind a classic visual illusion routine I saw at the British Embassy in Washington, DC.

Here’s how it went. A  performer would come out and state something like, “I really wish I had become a dairy farmer” and he’d pantomime a gesture which a dairy farmer might do – like milking a cow – and then keep repeating the gesture. The next performer would come out, stand right beside the first, and express his own “I really wish I had become…” – like a professional baseball player – and repeat that mimed gesture loop. A third performer might wish to be a lingerie designer for plus-sized women. The thing was that the gestures next to each other started an hysterical slapstick chain of 8 performers – where cow milker just barely ducks the bat swinger whose completed swing temporarily becomes the pole on which an imaginary pair of plus-size panties are hung for display, etc., etc.  Great side-splitting fun!

Can someone out there can help me with a title of this routine or a video?