Camouflage and mimicry are usually seen as biological phenomena, but they play an important role in human behaviour, the arts, and the theatre. Animals adapt their appearance and behavior to their environment to avoid detection. In the life sciences this animal behavior was theorized by Wallace, Darwin and Bates as camouflage (the adaptation of an animal's appearance to its non-animal surroundings); and as mimicry, today distinguished as crypsis (disguise to avoid detection) and masquerade (disguise to avoid recognition). The first definitions by Darwin and Wallace already show a striking use of theatrical and artistic terms such as imitation, bluffing, acting, and masquerade, to describe animal, and by extension human, mimicry. This project investigates the origins of the connections between camouflage, mimicry, and the theater, by mapping the theatrical dimension of theories about mimetic behavior in human and non-human animals before and next to the theory of evolution. Taking its departure from a conceptualization of human camouflage and mimicry as cultural techniques, this project explores in what manners these can related to (1) the broad cultural application of the word 'mimeisthai' (to imitate’/‘to portray’) in Ancient Greece, and (2) the debate in 18th-century acting theories where camouflage and mimicry are constantly used to theorize theatrical mimesis and in particular acting.