A practitioner examines the evolution of the urban sport/art/discipline called parkour

Jon LucasFamed traceur Daniel Ilabaca executes a cat balance

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. (more…)

Tags: freerunning, Halifax, parkour, toronto
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