“Crawlers, come to the line — please don your blindfolds,” said William Pope.L, the multidisciplinary artist, serving as master of ceremonies before a large crowd who assembled Saturday in a Greenwich Village playground.

Five men and women, each missing a shoe and encumbered with a flashlight in one hand, came belly down to the ground. They began to crawl along the gritty, unsavory New York City sidewalk, led by a marshal perfuming the air and sweeping the ground before them — and serenaded by a trumpeter playing melancholic riffs. The procession stopped traffic and drew people out of shops and restaurants, wondering what was going on.

Over the next five hours, some 140 people participated — wide-ranging in ages, ethnicity and physical ability — by dragging their bodies block-by-block, relay-style, along a 1.5 mile route through the Village. They traversed past the AIDS Memorial on Greenwich Avenue and under the Washington Arch. Then the collective action culminated at Union Square, with all the participants streaming up the steps, en masse, as the trumpeter and a drummer played “When the Saints Go Marching In.”