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My ex is very seriously into Parkour. I went to his home city with him a few months back and met his crew. Really nice bunch of (very young) skaterish guys. No obvious uniform or lifestyle clothing, heavy boots, beanies pulled well down above eyes of a uniform fearlessness.
Some points that impressed me while speaking to them:
1. An insistence upon the nature of Parkour as a participatory experience rather than a spectable. In fact, there's a real fear of being turned into a spectacle and a strong feeling of resistance to the idea of 'performing'. For example, many of them didn't like Jump London and all of them hated the use of Parkour in adverts. They're very willing to teach Parkour to others, but, like Fight Club, if you turn up, they want to see you run too. Watching is considered to be missing the point.
2. For a similar reason, the French guys, while being respected for their skill (all the guys I spoke to said they were the best), are generally thought of as 'sell-outs', because they're seen as trying to turn Parkour into a sport with money, sponsorship, professional athletes etc.
3. The website 'Urban Freeflow' is also looked down on by many of these guys, as they see it as another attempt to brand or pin-down Parkour into an aspirational lifestyle and sport, where it's more about visiting the shop and purchasing accessories and clothing than actually doing Parkour.
4. Needless to say, the attempts by Nike, etc, to rebrand Parkour as the copyrightable Free Running(TM), push it as a lifestyle and train 'stars' capable of unattainably perfect and suicidally amazing stunts as a way of getting more bums on seats and ultimately selling more trainers, are hated with a fanatical passion.
I love the questions that Parkour opens up. Questions about the ownership and permitted use of public spaces, the liberation of the individual from the architecture that surrounds them (and of the individual's mind from that of the planner) and the replacement of ingrained patterns of movement with an agile and spontaneous creativity.
I also think that, far more than martial arts, Parkour is the definitive toolkit for urban survival, if that's your bent. Because you're never, ever, ever going to catch these guys in the city if they don't want to be caught!
Above all though, I think it reminds us of how much we limit ourselves through conditioned fear and habit. I was watching an orange cat walk on a wall the other day. The wall was about 5 inches wide at the top and on one side dropped fifty feet to a carpark below. Without the slightest hesitation, the cat jumped lightly onto the wall and trotted loosely along, sprang carelessly to another wall across ten feet of clear space, sat down and washed itself.
It never once occurred to me - or the cat - that it would fall. Watching these Parkour guys play was similar. |
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