City dance

The first time my roommate heard the word "parkour," she thought it was a picnic to be eaten in an English garden. It isn't, but if you were to eat a picnic in an English garden, you might witness some parkour, and perhaps you’d enjoy it. Fundamentally, parkour is about getting from one point to another in the most creatively efficient way possible, in balance between expedience and exhibition. Because the city is a jungle gym waiting to be played on. One must become stronger, faster, better balanced, and always more fluid. What could you climb on, jump to, balance on? Look up. One must open one’s eyes to the world in a new way. Just like a great piece of dance invigorates an audience with beautiful movement, parkour is a dance across a stage of concrete, trees, and railings. As you walk down the street, coffee in hand, briefcase in the other, I know you see that knee level ledge next to the raised flower bed. It’s just asking to be jumped on. Put the coffee down, and the briefcase, and hop up. Look around. The world looks so low from up here! Run around up there a little bit. Ok, you can climb down now, if you want. Was it fun? Yes people think you look ridiculous, at first. Just put on a costume of slick sweatpants, a flashy t-shirt—preferably with no arms—and a sticky set of sneaks: now they know you mean business. They might continue to laugh for a while, but as you get faster, stronger, better balanced, and more graceful, a crowd will start to amass. Do you do it for this crowd? Maybe a little. But if you’re going to get better, you’ll have to fail a lot in front of that same crowd. The dramatic tension those failures add will only bring more of an audience. By attempting to stick the landing of a simple 5-foot jump over and over and over, they will begin to understand how precise you must be to land on that four inch pipe. Too far. Too far. Not enough. Even when you manage to hit it well with your feet, balancing yourself for more than a second and a half is all but impossible. Now your friend wants to try, and she’s been doing this for a while. She jumps, throwing her body in a high arc, arms raised, body a crescent moon cutting through the air, and—snap—her legs coil in front again, feet smacking steel, knees bending slightly, then straightening, as she stands poised, then jumps down. Beautiful. Exciting theater reexamines human interactions and lets you look at yourself from a new perspective; parkour, similarly, re-envisions the way humans interact with their surroundings. When people watch you up there, on display before the world, they see you at your most vulnerable. “Watch me as I fail,” you say. Because there is drama in the way humans interact with the land. We evolved in forests, on mountains, on sprawling grassy plains; one step was not just like the one before it. Throw out the unspoken rules of how you get from one place to another, and you’ll reengage your whole body in your movement. You don’t need a skateboard or time trials or prize money or critics to make movement on the urban landscape exciting and dramatic. I’m an acting student in the BFA program at the University of Minnesota, and one of the reasons I love parkour is that it reminds me what performance is really about. A standard theater rehearsal process secludes the performer from the audience until the specified time when the product is expected to be good enough to show. In parkour, the rehearsal room is also the performance space. The audience isn’t invited to begin with, so the same audience that will be there at the end may not be there at the beginning. When I climb and jump on the University’s structures, people see every time I fall. Chances are, even after hours of trying, I can’t accomplish half the things I try. It humbles the performer in me: I’m an actor because I like the stories and the imaginary worlds of theater. And, I like to remember that the audience is there to share with, not to show off for. With parkour, the audience is welcome to come and go as they please, to witness the entire process. When I watch parkour, I want to go outside and practice parkour. Parkour invites the world to play.