A practitioner examines the evolution of the urban sport/art/discipline called parkour
Pick the right time and day to approach the steps at the foot of Citadel Hill, Halifax’s central tourist site/fortress, and you will encounter a ragtag group of people behaving in a rather unusual way: balancing delicately on the railings, hanging off of the walls, leaping up over them from the sidewalk, and bantering on the hillside grass. If you are a casual passerby, you will most likely steer clear of this strange display. But if you have come to practice parkour, you will be greeted with hugs from everyone there.
Parkour, for those who have not yet heard of or seen it, is an urban lifestyle sport/art/discipline in which practitioners (called traceurs) train themselves to efficiently and gracefully climb, jump, vault, and crawl over whatever is in front of them. Not yet highly codified, it is often glossed as “the art of overcoming obstacles,” which allows for interpretations both literal and metaphorical. Parkour originated in the mid-’90s in France, but quickly caught on worldwide after videos of traceurs’ acrobatics began to circulate on YouTube soon after the site’s founding in 2005. The images that have come to characterize it for millions of viewers — shirtless men hurtling like renegade ninja from rooftop to rooftop, performing death-defying flips and high landings — belie a philosophical core that many practitioners hold dear: a focus on disciplined personal improvement, a rejection of showiness and competition, and a commitment to altruism and openness.
The Halifax traceurs are earnest followers of these values. Meets are always free to attend. Passers-by are given ample room to pass by, but whatever questions they have are answered with voracious enthusiasm and invitations to join. The more senior members encourage beginners to progress at their own pace, and take care to teach them strong fundamentals, like the basics of landing, to prevent injury. Flips and tricks are fun to try and in no way forbidden, but they’re seen as being risky and somewhat beside the central point; it doesn’t matter whether you’re working on a “lazy vault” or a “wall spin,” so long as you are moving, learning, and challenging yourself.
The group is populated by people of all ability levels and walks of life, with ages ranging from the teens to the sixties. Its members’ habit of hugging hellos and goodbyes is a local idiosyncrasy, but it seems a fitting practice for traceurs; like the whole activity of parkour, receiving welcoming hugs from mere acquaintances is a rewarding violation of some of the default boundaries of everyday urban life — boundaries which, on reflection, there is little excuse for us to consider ourselves bound by, except that everyone else seems to obey them.
* * *
The public space of our cities is more often than not dead and unfriendly for us: an expanse of road and sidewalk that one uses to get from A to B while trying one’s best to ignore all the other people doing the same. Ever since first wandering up to join the group on Citadel Hill a little over a year ago, I’ve noticed parkour changing how I perceive my environment: what was before meaningless background is now a nice round railing at a good level for vaulting, or a gap between concrete ledges suitable for precision jumping, or a small structure of tantalizingly scaleable height. I find myself considering the opportunities for fun that are latent in everything around me, itching to pull off new moves and explore unknown places. University campus, public park, neglected alleyway, soulless business district lunch area: a traceur can experience them all as potential challenges and joys.
A large part of parkour training consists not in drilling technique or conditioning, but in learning the limits of your body. On the first approach to a gap, even one that you are physically very capable of jumping across, your self-preservation instincts may scream out in alarm. The more you practice jumping, the better you get at sizing up how far you can go and how precise you can be. When you return, compare the gap, and are sure you can clear it, you can judiciously ignore that sense of danger and make the leap. The ensuing feeling — that of accomplishing something that instinctually strikes you as impossible or suicidal — is delicious. A few more repetitions, and you stop perceiving gaps of that size as alarming at all. In the course of this expanding of personal boundaries, besides simply becoming more capable, you gain an ever-improving understanding of what your capabilities are, without which you would still fear to attempt things that, it turns out, you can (sometimes) easily do.
This experience of learning, and pushing, one’s limits is central for traceurs, and self-sufficiency is, accordingly, a strong current in parkour culture. The notion of requiring any sort of special gear is typically treated with derision (some even swear by barefoot training); in both Halifax and Toronto, the meets I’ve attended have been casually disorganized, with a quick vote determining our destination, and the next obstacle chosen by whomever hops over it. There is a sense of underground resistance to it all: traceurs reject the paths given them by the world at large, banding together to improve, learn from one another, and carve their own ways.
* * *
Since it first exploded across YouTube, parkour’s presence in popular culture has steadily grown, seeing it featured prominently in major movies (Banlieue 13, Casino Royale) and video games (Mirror’s Edge, Prince of Persia, Assassin’s Creed) and parodied on The Office. In 2007, a number of high-profile traceurs signed on with the newly invented World Freerunning and Parkour Federation (WFPF), based in the US, and in the same year, Red Bull sponsored the first major parkour/freerunning* competition. This May, MTV aired a six-episode series called Ultimate Parkour Challenge, featuring eight WFPF traceurs. The advertising framed them as death-defying daredevils “putting it all on the line” for competition, highlighted their risk-taking and rough falls, and, ridiculously, augmented these experts’ gentle, practiced landings with overdubbed thumps and quake-like tremors. WFPF is now marketing a branded shoe designed specifically for parkour (which typically shreds footwear). The shoes, it must be admitted, sound awesome — light enough to float on water, reinforced in heavy-wear areas, and, most crucially, easily replaceable at $40 — but the merchandising precedent they set is worrisome. The version of parkour that its ever-widening audience receives could increasingly be one dictated by what creates ratings and sales for those marketing it. The occasionally defensive tone of the WFPF’s mission statement (“No doubt [there'll] still be people who won’t like the show, HATE it even, and they’re entitled to their opinions, for sure”) betrays that much of the global community is still very hostile to their push toward showiness, competition, and monetization. Whether an underground sport that explicitly rejects all of those things can resist the market’s inexorable pull toward them remains to be seen. (There are a lot of parallels to the popularization of skateboarding, which likewise began in underground, nonconformist obscurity and then transformed considerably as it became a worldwide phenomenon.)
* * *
I’ve only been out with the Toronto parkour community a few times now. Every week, they form a loping, leaping crowd at the north end of Queen’s Park, warm up when enough people have arrived, and then decide where to run for the day. It’s a bigger bunch than the Halifax group, and a bit less warm and friendly, but they still have much in common. In both towns, the group has a sort of leader who makes suggestions and provides help, but never acts as though in charge. Also in both, you are unlikely to attend a session without hearing words of encouragement or helpful suggestions spontaneously offered by traceurs to whom you have never spoken before. However, much of the Toronto community’s activity takes place at a local parkour-oriented gym, The Monkey Vault. The gym appears to be friendly, reasonably priced, and magnificently equipped for all aspects of training, offering introductory classes and one-on-one coaching as well. But the more that parkour training moves into gyms, with formal classes and special equipment, the further it moves from the remarkably free and open meet-up model that originally ruled. The increasing focus on the kind of gymnastic stunts that can’t be safely learned without padding and foam pits pushes it still further from those roots.
Enthusiasts of the art literally built and run The Monkey Vault, and concerns about “selling out” are at least still acknowledged in the WFPF’s releases, but parkour is positioned to increasingly be dominated by the same corporate interests who have already made an industry of “extreme sport.” It is hard to predict whether the contrarian ideological core originally attached to parkour will resist these changes, or simply be rewritten. But in the meantime, I intend to enjoy what seems to be a golden in-between period: conveniences like dedicated gyms have begun to appear and there is enough interest to guarantee gatherings everywhere — but traceurs are still freely meeting up, setting out, and making the city their own with nothing but their hands, feet, and sneakers.
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