Artists too have explored this impulse:  In Trisha Brown’s 1971 “Walking Down the Side of a Building,” a person wearing a harness dangled horizontally and “walked” from the top of a building down to the street. Elizabeth Streb has taken the idea various steps further in works that send dancer-acrobats soaring from trampolines and down to the earth from high walls. A lot of people, it seems, dream of feeling what Philippe Petit felt as he walked across the tightrope between the Twin Towers in 1974.

I’ve never shared that desire, but people who do say that that at those moments, suspended in the air or on a sheer rockface or deep underwater, what they feel is peace and freedom. And that in that peace there is a kind of beauty. This is the principle behind Rachid Ouramdane’s new show “Corps Extrêmes,” which has just come to the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of Van Cleef & Arpels’s new dance festival, Dance Reflections.

The festival is heavy on French dancemakers; Ouramdane, a French-Algerian choreographer, is the director of the Chaillot-Théâtre National de la Danse in Paris. In this piece, he features a group of dancer-acrobats as well as a tightrope walker, or highliner. Not just any highliner, but Nathan Paulin, who holds records for traversing vast expanses, including the plain around the Mont Saint-Michel, on a slack line. In the show, we see him first in a film, walking, sitting, even lying down on a tightrope strung across a steep ravine. In another film we see the climber Nina Caprez attached to a sheer rockface, her fingers hanging onto tiny crevices in the rock. These beautifully-shot films (by Jean-Camille Goimard) give you a sense of vertigo, a vortex in the pit of your stomach. The audience titters nervously.