Purrkour and Kindness

[post 387]

I've written a lot about parkour and its relationship to physical comedy, especially here, but also in all these other posts, so I can't resist sharing the feline version, "Purrkour,"a brilliant piece of filmmaking by Robert Dollwet. (Thanks to Riley Kellogg for the link!)

 

If you have cats (we have four) and have ever tried to train them, you know whence comes the expression "it's like herding cats." Or to put it another way:

But it is possible, as this behind-the-scenes video demonstrates:



Which leads me to the whole controversy today about cruelty to animals in the circus, with prevailing sentiment being unilaterally against the work of animal trainers. Belgium, for example, has totally banned the use of wild animals in circuses! Now I'm all for the humane treatment of animals, but this blanket condemnation is simply unfair to most animal trainers.

And that leads me to one of my favorite stories about training animals. It's by Antony Hippisley Coxe from his excellent book A Seat at the Circus (1951). He was an historian, not a circus performer, but decided to try his hand at training — you guessed it — domestic cats. Real interesting stuff with a very funny ending, so much so that I bothered to scan it for you and put it into this pdf. Worth the 10-page read!

Damien Walters: Freerunning meets Physical Comedy

[post 378]

I like parkour and I've already written several posts about it. I like it not only because it's cool and acrobatic and creative, but because its use of the existing environment and everyday objects has a lot in common with physical comedy. No wonder that many parkour devotees adopt Douglas Fairbanks and Buster Keaton as their patron saints.

The awesome work of Damien Walters, champion trampolinist, big-movie stuntman, and parkour artist can be seen on YouTube in the form of annual showreels dating back to 2006. What I've done here, exclusively for my favorite physical comedy blogopedia, is to compile a new reel showing you the good (aka physical comedy-ish) parts. Watch Damien hopscotch rooftops; get dressed and undressed in mid-air; fly over, into, and through moving cars; bounce off of trees and fit through "trap doors"; and leap into chairs, sofas, and beds. True, they're not necessarily all done for laughs, but I'm sure you can make the connections. Enjoy!

Blink and you'll miss it, but if you look closely at the 54-second mark, you'll see that the bottle of soda starts by being held between his feet and he grabs it half way through the sommy!

Parkour Moves Indoors

[post 335]

Parkour and physical comedy have a lot in common: a similar technical vocabulary, creativity interacting with real-world physical structures, and many of the same heroes — Buster Keaton, Douglas Fairbanks, Georges Hébert. I've already written extensively about all that in this earlier post, one of my personal favorites, so today I just want to alert you to this NY Times article:

An excerpt:
Parkour gyms have opened across the country, from Los Angeles to Rochester, featuring juice bars, private classes and children’s birthday parties that cost $450 (cake not included). Specialized apparel companies sell tailored gloves for $34.50 and shoes for $60. An international organization offers special parkour insurance policies and charges $295 for teacher certification courses.

Needless to say, this is controversial. Click here to read the whole article (and the reader comments!), see a slide show, and view a pretty good 3-minute video. (If the video is no longer there, it will be archived here.)

Parkour Meets Rube Goldberg

[post 280]

Parkour and Rube Goldberg both overlap with the athleticism and inventiveness of physical comedy, and I've already written about them on this blog, especially here and here. And while parkour freerunners usually tackle found environments, here's a wild video of parkour being staged on what may be the world's largest Rube Goldberg machine. It features German freerunner Jason Paul and was sponsored by Red Bull™. Best viewed at full screen!




Thanks to Drew Richardson for the link.

Bicycle Parkour — More Danny MacAskill

[post 195]

I like bikes.

I like comedy cycling, but I also like just plain old biking. Yes, I'm one of those annoying bike evangelists who bikes everywhere and tries to make you feel bad for not doing the same. Not surprising, then, that I'm awed by Danny MacAskill and his amazing bike tricks — what I am officially dubbing bicycle parkour™ — and which I featured in this previous post.

That ride from 2009 was unbelievable enough, but happily there are two more recent professionally produced videos. Way Back Home (2010) takes our man Dan on an amazing journey from Edinburgh to Skye. Thanks to Martie LaBare for the link!





And from last month (aka August 2011), here's Industrial Revolutions from the project Concrete Circus. Who knew rusting industrial waste could be so much fun?



Don't try this at home, but if you do, wear a helmet!

For more cool stuff, check out Danny's web site and the MacAskill page of his corporate sponsor, Red Bull.

Movement Training for Actors

Moni Yakim teaches a class at Juilliard
(Photo: Jessica Katz)

[post 190]

The notion that physical comedians and other movement artists might have something to teach traditional actors goes back at least a century, when such innovative directors as Jacques Copeau in France and Vsevolod Meyerhold in Russia hired accomplished clowns and variety performers as guest instructors. In the United States, this became a trend in the 60s and 70s as "experimental" theatres sought to break the confines of the fourth wall and Stanislavski method acting to forge more theatrical performance styles.

Jewel Walker and Hovey Burgess were two of the first teachers to become influential fixtures at major universities ((Carnegie-Mellon and NYU). Nowadays no respectable college acting program is without its movement specialist and — if you believe the optimistic job descriptions you see in the ad postings — the desired skill set includes mime, circus, clown, acrobatics, masks, dance, biomechanics, yoga, and stage combat, not to mention the techniques of Laban, Feldenkrais, Alexander, Grotowski, Decroux, Lecoq, and Pilates. If you can integrate it with vocal training, so much the better! All this for a position that is often low on the faculty pay scale and not even tenure-track.

Movement training for actors was not just some trendy idea that came and went. It is now widely accepted in the profession and has demonstrably expanded the range and possibilities of many a successful performer. I bring this up because I recently stumbled upon two useful articles on the subject in American Theatre magazine that are available on the web. This first offers a broad survey of the field, what the disciplines are, and what value various teachers and performers see in it.

Here are a few quotes:

"Suppose I hit a line drive over the head of the second baseman. I'm off running right away. And I'm watching the ball, and there comes the possibility I can get to second base on this hit. My body knows without looking where first base is, and I need to watch only the ball and the fielder. If I have to look down at my feet, I've lost. That's like being on stage—you have to be super aware." — Jewel Walker

"What is essential? It tends to change, depending upon the time period. I've been teaching for a long time, and students used to be a bit more out there and crazy: curious, and wildly splattering themselves on the walls. So it was a matter of focusing that wild energy. Students coming in now are better trained, in many ways, and more disciplined. Sometimes you want to tweak that wildness." — Jim Calder

"The hardest things to teach actors are that the pedestrian body embodies a kind of virtuosity, and that movement has a theatrical power that must be trusted in its own right. Actors want to act; they want to create some reason why they are standing on the stage. I take that away from an actor—I say, 'Oh, just raise your arm, just take four steps to the right, just bow your head'—it has meaning. The body is expressing things that are way beyond what you can impose on it in this moment." — Annie Parsons

"Three strong voices spoke to me—Bertolt Brecht, Jerzy Grotowski and Étienne Decroux—and I see them as a triangle of aspects of what I think constitutes full actor training. From Grotowski, it was the visceral aspect, of going beyond the socially acceptable and really finding the primal, visceral self; and from Brecht it was the whole aspect of dramaturgy and social relevance and the importance of the relationship of the artist on stage to the audience. And from Decroux, the concept of shape and form spoke to me—this idea of the actor's ability to physically manifest thought and give specificity to emotion.... The laws of physics tell us that gravity falls through us and pulls us to a perfect vertical. And life pushes us off of that sense of neutrality. If we understand that neutrality, then we understand how a character is pulled off of being perfect. Life creates our imperfections. And a character is a beautiful collection of imperfections."  — Kari Margolis

"I deal with various forms of the mask, including the red nose. One is the full-faced character mask; it is a nonverbal mask. I follow that by the neutral, universal mask—also nonverbal—and that I follow with the character half-mask, which is a verbal mask. All of that is followed by the red nose, for what I call contemporary classic clowning. [Prior to the clown work, Francesconi works with...] “...movement improvisation, which is nonverbal. It is somewhat abstract, somewhat of a combination of modern dance and eccentric behavior, which is the basis, really, of physical comedy. 'Eccentric behavior' could be something as simple as a body part going out of control. It is essential that the early work be somewhat abstract and focused on the body in space, rather than on creating story."

— Robert Francesconi

You can read the whole article here.

The second article features ten prominent performers, each explaining what approach they use for creating a more dynamic stage presence.

Again some quotes:

"I encourage Synetic actors to train in parkour movements because there is an emphasis on gaining knowledge of one's body in space as it relates to dangers (falling, colliding with objects, losing balance) and applying that knowledge to move through obstacles with ease and safety. To me, parkour is about understanding the relationship between your body and the physical world, and enjoying it. Learn to fall, roll, land, climb and interact with the physical world so that you can perform better in your run, play or dance piece. The real joy of parkour is that it changes how you look at your environment—everything becomes a potential playground!" — Ben Cunis

"Lecoq is a way, a path—not a 'technique'—that asks the actor: What do you have to say? Tragedy, commedia and bouffon all have a different approach, but the overarching theme in Lecoq is 'actor as creator.' The process helps you develop your own voice, not just as an actor but also as a theatre artist. That rounded training is lacking in the U.S. The empowerment of the actor to understand more than just the role he is playing is not often embraced here, and in New York there is a palpable hunger for physical-theatre training." — Richard Crawford

"I just played Florindo, the boastful lover in A Servant of Two Masters, at Yale Rep. I went back to basics: leading with the chest, exercising muscles in my back, realizing how to look upward when I walked around, asking where my character's power comes from. Florindo is a funny character, but not to himself. Even doing commedia, I had to find the truth in this body. I did a whole monologue walking straight downstage till I got to the apron, and then ran all the way back crying and yelling. To do that eight times a week, you have to go back to your training. That's what Moni's [Yakim] about: the freedom inside the body when doing these extreme characterizations." — Jesse Perez

And you can read that whole article here.

The articles have lots of links, plus the reader comments to each article provide some additional information and pespectives.

Live from Thailand: Monkeys & Elephants & Me (Oh My!), or, My Search for Physical Comedy in Chiang Mai

[post 184]

I'm not in Thailand for physical comedy, but I do keep my eyes open. I like to believe that clowning is universal, as natural as human error, but that doesn't mean every place you visit is a hotbed of variety theatre, much less of inspired foolishness. Here in Chiang Mai, "cultural capital of northern Thailand," physical comedy has proven to be an elusive commodity.

My first foray was to the famed Sunday Market, said to be full of amazing crafts and street performers. The crafts were in abundance, but the only buskers carving out space on its nearly impassable streets were musicians soulfully strumming and drumming on traditional Thai instruments, ultimately bumming for tourist tips; lovely, but hardly physical comedy.

Then there are the cabarets; the place is teeming with them. Surely I'd find something old or new vaudevillian there....

Nope.

It turns out that they owe their popularity to lady boy transvestite / transgender revues, not to slapstick shenanigans. (See this recent BBC News piece on the lady boys' runaway popularity at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival!) An interesting enough phenomenon, but was this the kind of variety I was looking for?

After exhaustive research sitting at a bar for over a half hour, I did find one lady boy cabaret numéro that was borderline blog-worthy: a two-faced interpretation of the song One-Man Woman. I’m guessing you’ve seen this bit before: the performer plays two roles simultaneously, swiveling 180˚ from profile to profile, a different makeup and costume on each side, now a woman, now a man. It does go with the lyrics and is certainly a good fit for a drag show, but as a visual gimmick it wears thin quickly if you don't do anything original with it. Admittedly I’m not a huge fan of lip synching, especially here: if you're going to play two characters, actually do something different with them, starting with the voice!

But there I was at the bar, concealed Flip camera in hand, cleverly sitting right next to the much overused spotlight and right where all the waiters had to cross in front of me  to pick up their drink orders, the ideal spot to grab some footage. You might dismiss the results as bad cinematography, but I know better. This is merely my genius at rendering a complete 4-D environmental experience. So what if you can barely see the main performer! It’s only 17 seconds, enough to get the idea.

Okay, so that was the worst quality video ever posted to this blog!

The rest of the show was all glitter and no substance, physical comedy or otherwise. So....  no street performance, no cabaret, but as it turned out there were hearty physical comedy laughs to be found amongst Thailand’s most celebrated citizens. Yes, I’m talking about its talented elephants and monkeys. I've seen a bunch of circuses in my day, even been in a few, ridden an elephant bareback (bareneck?) and know enough not to come near a chimpanzee while wearing clown makeup. But in Thailand I still found myself saying, "I didn't know they could do that!"

The pachyderms at the Maesa Elephant Camp dance, play harmonica, kick and block a soccer ball, dunk basketballs, and beat human beings at dart throwing.

Here are a couple of elephants playing with me; to all appearances, toying with me. At first a sniff of danger, realizing those powerful trunks enveloping my puny body could flick me clear across the Burmese border. On the one hand threatening, on the other comic release from their docile behavior. They tease me, bestowing a safari hat on my head, giving it a few pats for good luck, then take it away. Feed them a bunch of bananas or a piece of sugar cane and they scarf it down. Give them a 20-baht tip and they pass it back overhead to their mahout.

And they even paint better than me! That top photo is of an elephant making “art“ before my very eyes and the image below shows the standard work churned out by these four-legged Rembrandts three times a day. (I wanted to buy one to hang on my refrigerator back home so guests would think my kids were more artsy, but they were too expensive.)

But all this brings up the question: does the elephant actually know what it’s painting? When it paints an elephant, does it see it as a self-portrait? When it throws a dart, it understands the goal, but does it even know that it's in competition with the human, much less that we find it very funny if it wins? And above all does it get the basic reversal joke? — the “inferior” animal getting the best of the human.

Groucho Marx liked to claim that his comic foil Margaret DuMont rarely understood the humor of their scenes together and would ask why the audience was laughing. Highly unlikely, given her long career as a comedienne, but of course from the audience’s perspective it does not matter whether or not elephants or Margaret Dumont think their routines are funny.

Still, I am curious. The elephants perform actions, endlessly repeated without any trace of boredom on their part. The work is easy, they get rewards, plenty of attention and positive reinforcement, but do they enjoy the event for its own sake? And if so, do they have a sense of humor about it all? The obvious answer is, no, there’s no way they understand what humor is, the irony of the situation, or even that the humans are laughing.

Many animals do, however, have a clearly documented sense of play that is not so different from what we might call a sense of humor. For example: monkeys. I do love me some monkeys. Like cats, they have a highly developed sense of play, and like cats they are natural acrobats, only ten times more so. Is it possible they have a sense of humor too? In your typical Chiang Mai monkey show — I saw two, very similar — they pose, they strut, they interact with the audience in carefully scripted routines. They outsmart humans, for example by (apparently) performing feats of memory (a numbers game) better than an audience volunteer.

_______________________

“When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her.”
— Michel de Montaigne, French essayist (1533–1592)

_____________________________

Here's a video of me needing a monkey to escape from bondage: the joke of the monkey's superiority, with a sweet touch of trans-species bonding thrown in, complete with kisses.

But in this video, my all-too-human pride wouldn't let me go along with the joke. No monkey was going to beat me at shooting foul shots! I wisely adapted to the low net by choosing Wilt Chamberlain's underhand style, sunk the first two but, suffering from all-too-human overconfidence, rushed the last one. Still, two out of three was good enough to beat a fellow homo sapien and a monkey who can dunk but chokes at the free throw line. The crowd may have been disappointed, but a man's a man, when all is said and done.

_________________________________

Okay, okay, this post has obviously been more full of questions than answers, but this is a blog so I'm allowed to think out loud and to free associate, right?

So while I'm still chuckling about monkeys, here are some related videos which recently crossed my desk here at AFD Central. The first is a remarkable BBC piece on drunken monkeys courtesy of NYC clown Billy Schultz.



We all wish we could climb like monkeys. Well, at least I do, and it's a fact that the founders of parkour studied monkey behavior, as I discussed in this previous blog post, which just happens to be one of my favorites. But I doubt anyone can beat this guy in India, who climbs walls as well as any primate I ever saw:

And finally, speaking of wall climbing, from Brazil comes this cool Nextel commercial, courtesy of clown, artist, and All Fall Down guest blogger Karen Gersch:



I don't know much about this, but was able to track down one of the performers, Guto Vasconcelos, who was a clown with Cirque du Soleil for ten years and who writes: "This was a corporate gig for Nextel; the company's name is Ares, my friend is the director. I don't believe the the website is up yet, but you can google or youtube and for sure you will find some more clips."

_________________________________

That's it for now. Goodbye to Thailand (and India and Brazil) and my jungle-inspired ramblings. As one monkey said to the other,  "We're not laughing with you, we're laughing at you."

Not Exactly Physical Comedy: Inspired Bicycles

[post 093]

No comedy here, but I like biking and this has the most amazing bike stunts I've ever seen — parkour on two wheels!



Here's some background from the YouTube page: Filmed over the period of a few months in and around Edinburgh by Dave Sowerby, this video of Inspired Bicycles team rider Danny MacAskill (more info at www.dannymacaskill.com) features probably the best collection of street/street trials riding ever seen. There's some huge riding, but also some of the most technically difficult and imaginative lines you will ever see. Without a doubt, this video pushes the envelope of what is perceived as possible on a trials bike.

My Life as a Parkour Traceur

[post 042]


I guess it's a generational thing, but when I mention parkour to anyone over 40, I usually get a blank stare, which if nothing else makes me feel young and in the know. If you too are going "huh?" just think of those videos you've probably seen of ridiculously agile teenage daredevils — Spidermen without the web — jumping on, over and off walls, railings and other structures that get in their way. They are called traceurs presumably because they trace a path through space while leaving only a faint imprint.

The Wikipedia definition is pretty good: "a physical discipline of French origin in which participants run along a route, attempting to negotiate obstacles in the most efficient way possible, as if moving in an emergency situation, using skills such as jumping and climbing, or the more specific parkour moves. The object is to get from one place to another using only the human body and the objects in the environment around you. The obstacles can be anything in one's environment, but parkour is often seen practiced in urban areas because of the many suitable public structures that are accessible to most people, such as buildings and rails."

If you still don't know what I'm talking about, here's one of those videos:



This summer in London I actually had the opportunity to participate in a parkour workshop and performance at the National Theatre, meet some of the original practitioners, and grow some thoughts about connections between parkour and physical comedy. I would have written this sooner, but there's so much to cover!

Parkour is essentially a street art form like graffiti or skateboarding, but with its own unique philosophy and history. The word parkour comes from the original French term, parcours, meaning course, as in obstacle course. Parkour seems to have become the accepted international spelling because it's phonetic and therefore less likely to confuse. Depending on who you're listening to, free running and l'art du déplacement are either synonyms for or variations on parkour. (Wikipedia translates l'art du déplacement as the art of moving, though it also contains the more exact sense of displacement or shifting.)



Origins
If there is an inventor of parkour, it would have to be David Belle , the guy in the video above. Belle developed parkour with friends in Lisse (just south of Paris) in the 1990s, and has since become an international celebrity as an actor and stuntman in films and commercials. He was also the subject of a New Yorker profile piece, which you can read here.

The story of parkour, however, goes back way before Belle and, in fact, shares roots with modern movement theatre. Belle's father Raymond — a French soldier, fitness enthusiast, and firefighter — was a legend in his own right. Raymond Belle's training in the French military had brought him into contact with the teachings of Georges Hébert, which he passed onto his son, and which played a key role in formulating the basic tenets of parkour.

And who was Georges Hébert? He was a French military officer who traveled all over the world before World War I and later became a teacher of physical education. Hébert came to the conclusion that the weight training regimen used by the military was building muscle without promoting dexterity and speed. In its place he developed la méthode naturelle, which he based on the movement skills of indigenous peoples he had observed in his travels, especially in Africa. "Their bodies were splendid, flexible, nimble, skillful, enduring, resistant and yet they had no other tutor in Gymnastics but their lives in Nature."

Hébert's natural method, also known as hébertisme, promoted "the qualities of organic resistance, muscularity and speed, towards being able to walk, run, jump, move quadrupedally, to climb, to keep balance, to throw, lift, defend yourself and to swim." One of Hébert's top tools for achieving this was the obstacle course — le parcours du combattant — which was to become integral to French military training. So if you ever hated being forced to run an obstacle course back in high school or in army basic training, you have Hébert to blame. On the other hand, if you ever did an Outward Bound program and loved it or you're into adventure racing, how about a tip of the hat to uncle Georges?

Although his teachings were already widely accepted by the '40s, the publication of his multi-volume work, L'éducation physique et morale par la méthode naturelle (1941–43) no doubt cemented his reputation. Here are some scans from the book, courtesy of Hovey Burgess.









Hébert's work was also a strong influence on French theatre, and specifically on movement training for actors. Jacques Copeau, whose work in the 1920s at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris was strong on improvisation and physical training, adopted Hébert's natural approach to movement as an antidote to the artificial stylings of the staid establishment theatres. He created the Vieux-Colombier theatre school, whose instructors included the Fratellini clowns and one M. Moine, an Hébert-trained teacher.

There is a clear line from Copeau's school straight through to modern times through such figures as Jean Dasté, Jean Dorcy, Étienne Decroux, and Jacques Lecoq. Decroux taught such physical performers as Jean-Louis Barrault, Marcel Marceau, and Leonard Pitt, and created modern corporeal mime, inspiring such mime artists as Thomas Leabhart and Daniel Stein.

Lecoq writes about his debt to Hébert in his book Le Théâtre du Geste and in The Moving Body, describing him as one of the significant influences on the transition from artificial mime styles to a more scientific study of the body in motion. Mark Evans, in Movement Training for the Actor, points out that "Lecoq's Paris school was to find its final home in a disused gymnasium, a symbolic return he himself noted with approval... Lecoq's meticulous approach to the analysis of movement owes much to the French tradition of scientific, anthropological, and philosophical movement analysis..."


Silent Film
The film world offers more direct connections between parkour and physical comedy, the most obvious being the reverence parkour practitioners have for such silent film stars as Douglas Fairbanks and Buster Keaton. When Fairbanks first went to work in Hollywood in 1915, his boss was the legendary director, D.W. Griffith, whose Birth of a Nation had just changed the course of film history, and who immediately locked horns with the acrobatic young actor. "D.W. didn't like my athletic tendencies," Fairbanks recalled. "Or my spontaneous habit of jumping a fence or scaling a church at unexpected moments which were not in the script. Griffith told me to go to Keystone comedies." This parkour-like spontaneity was part of his creative process, prompting Alistair Cooke to comment that his collaborators needed "a willingness to let Fairbanks' own restlessness set the pace of the shooting and his gymnastics be the true improvisations on a simple scenario." The Mark of Zorro (1920) is just one of many examples of Fairbanks in parkour mode.



The following archival clip, which has appeared on some parkour sites, is from the movie Gizmo! (1977) and has also been identified on YouTube as from 1930, but is actually German stuntman Arnim Dahl (1922–1998), and is probably from the 50s.


Monkeys!
Another movement source for parkour is even more ancient: the animal kingdom. Or as they say on the Mumbai parkour web site:
Q: What do you get when you combine a monkey, a cat, and a frog together?
A: A Traceur!
In that New Yorker profile, David Belle talks about a trip to India and an encounter with a tribe of monkeys: “I was at a waterfall one day, and there were huge trees all around, and in the trees were monkeys. There were fences and barriers around them, so they couldn’t get out, but I went around the barriers and played with the monkeys. After that, I watched them all the time, learning how they climbed. All the techniques in parkour are from watching the monkeys.” Belle then showed the New Yorker reporter segments from the BBC documentary, Monkey Warriors. Here's a clip that shows exactly what he means:



Monkeys and physical comedy also have a shared heritage that can be traced back to popular animal impersonations by such 18th and 19th-century physical comedians as Grimaldi, Mazurier, Gouffé, Perrot, and Klischnigg , which you can read all about in chapter five of my book Clowns. You can get a good sense of what these performances might have been like from Buster Keaton's 1921 turn as a monkey in his short The Playhouse, which you can watch in the supplemental material for chapter five.



Philosophy
While the origins of parkour go way back, its rapid dissemination throughout the world came in the form of videos that were uploaded to the internet and quickly went viral. In fact, it has been said that parkour is the first art form whose growth into a movement has been totally dependent upon the internet. In the process, however, parkour has become a case of different strokes for different folks. For some, it is trick-based, the idea being to pull off the most spectacular stunt, and YouTube videos certainly lend themselves to showcasing these feats of derring-do. The founders and many subsequent practitioners have, however, framed it in far broader terms. Here are some of the concepts that have been put forward:

• Civilization has made people lazy, but parkour trains one to get along in nature and with one's physical environment. This hearkens back not only to Hébert, but also to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his writings on nature and the education of the whole person.

• Hébert's maxim "be strong in order to be useful" is often cited in parkour writing. Both David Belle's father and Hébert were "superheroes" who had won considerable acclaim for dramatic rescues made possible by their physical prowess.

• Parkour is a discipline, as much as any martial art. One must overcome mental obstacles to overcome physical obstacles. For example, the philosophy section of the American Parkour site reads: "Many people take the principles they learn through parkour and apply them to their lives. By challenging themselves in parkour both mentally and physically, it becomes easier to deal with problems and obstacles in everyday life. When a difficult situation comes up in daily life, a parkour practitioner can see this as any other obstacle which they've learned to overcome quickly, efficiently, and without disruption to their intended path."

• Parkour is play, and play is essential to creativity.

• The essence of parkour is the attainment of efficiency, moving efficiently through a space rather than around it. "If you run through a pedestrian zone without losing speed and without touching any person, you do good Parkour although you probably don't use any techniques like saut de bras or saut de chat." (Benedikt Bast)

• It is a fresh way of looking at one's physical world, viewing architecture as function rather than form. Parkour teaches pkvision, the ability to look at the environment and see the potential for movement within it.

• Parkour is self-expression, not performance. Once you start drawing attention to it, creating crowd-pleasing movements, is it still parkour?

• Instead of society discouraging parkour because of liability and insurance issues, parkour should be recognized as a valuable form of self-expression for youth, an alternative to over-indulgence in alcohol, drugs, or video games, and as an activity that does not require equipment or the formation of teams. Older practitioners of parkour send a message to youth that it is still okay to play.


The Urban Playground
So there we were in London in July, taking advantage of all the good productions offered at affordable prices (£10 and up) at the National Theatre, when we discovered that their outdoors series, Watch this Space, was sponsoring the performance troupe Urban Playground (an offshoot of the Prodigal Theatre in Brighton), in five days of parkour workshops, forums, and performances.

UPG (Urban Playground) performers come from backgrounds in contemporary dance and in Eastern European theatre labs, and specifically Grotowski's system of physical actions. They are older (thirty-somethings) and approach parkour less from a daring stunt angle and more from that of actor training, movement, and theatrical exploration. Their literature favors the term l'art du déplacement, and this definition of the term from Parkourpedia fits them nicely: "The spirit is still the same as Parkour, there is still the aim of being strong, to be useful and the need to overcome fears, but the movement is less concerned with speed and efficiency and more to do with the aesthetic of the movement."


UPG subverts traditional parkour use of found space by traveling with their own mobile playground, and this summer they even opened a permanent facility as well, the "UK’s first permanent, free, outdoor Parkour Training Area" in Crawley (West Sussex). They brought the mobile version to the National with them, and used it for their workshops and performances.

The Old Man & the Seesaw
Sorry about the pun, which at any rate may be wasted on those of you unschooled in the writings of Ernest Hemingway or Karen Gersch. I’m sure parkour has been done on a seesaw, but not by me. In fact, you could certainly argue that parkour has never been done by me, despite my decades of climbing trees, rocks, and man-made objects, not to mention hugging parking meters. But here's the story:

UPG's residency at the National included a series of short (free) workshops, including one just for kids, one just for women, and one just for brave souls over the age of 50. I somehow managed to qualify for the last one and, egged on by my sweetheart Riley, joined her in this afternoon adventure, wondering how my bad hip would feel after diving off rooftops and all that. Could I become the George Plimpton of parkour... and live to tell about it?

As it turned out, the workshop was not really challenging physically, but the process was quite interesting and worthwhile. Though it was taught from a dance and movement theatre perspective and certainly not from a physical comedy angle, it did give me a feel for the potential discoveries possible when one art form "samples" another.

Because of light rain, the workshop began in an upstairs lobby space. There were just eight of us: four students and all four UPG performers as teachers: Alister "Buster" O'Loughlin, Miranda Henderson, JP Omari, and Janine Fletcher. Not a bad faculty–student ratio, eh? Led by Buster, the workshop was first framed by a discussion of the history of parkour and of UPG's involvement. The warm-up began with follow-the-leader movement throughout the lobby space, with the kinds of walks and stretches that I'm sure many of you have experienced in workshops you've taken. The difference here was in the more deliberate use of the physical environment, from simply making contact with various surfaces (walls, steps, railings, furniture, etc.) as we passed near them, to pushing off and rolling off of walls as you ran, to engaging with obstacles rather than simply detouring around them.

Next was floor work, where we did some basic shoulder rolls, with the usual emphasis on smoothness, spreading out the contact with the floor, and controlling one's center of gravity well enough to roll in slow motion. Maintaining the line of attack of the roll was emphasized, and to work on our orientation in space we did them in pairs side by side, holding our partner with our free hand, trying to stay in unison as much as possible.

By then the rain had let up so we got to move outdoors to the "jungle gym." The first exercise was simply to move "through" one of the structure's horizontal bars on our own, either going over or under it, while our workshop leaders observed our choices. While it was not a question so much of right or wrong technique, there were some good suggestions for increasing efficiency and awareness of the space. One was to touch the apparatus as we went through even when we didn't need it for support, the idea being that this would aid our proprioceptive awareness of where our body parts were. The second was a specific technique for gripping the bar as we passed under it that involved crossing one wrist over the other so as to provide a smooth transition as our orientation rotated 180º.

We repeated these simple movements many times, focusing on efficiency and spatial awareness, and then built on them with a series of variations. We passed through one bar and then immediately through another at a 90º angle. We played with grips and positioning for maneuvering over the bar. We developed more complex paths through the structure and had one person begin when the person in front of them was only part way through, adjusting the timing to avoid collisions. By the end of this segment all eight of us were exploring the cubes and railings, as many as four at a time, moving in and out at will, developing awareness of the structure and of one another's movements.


Our Micro-Choreography
After a break for lunch, we were ready to start putting together what UPG terms a micro-choreography, a very short piece to be performed then and there for whatever public we could muster in the middle of a rainy afternoon. For yes, it had indeed started raining again, and we had a dilemma on our hands. All of the open-air structures were getting soaked, but what audience there was to be found would have to be outdoors. There was, however, an overhang just outside the National's coffee shop with a row of tables under it. Ever resourceful, UPG chose to commandeer the last table and its four plastic chairs and throw together some minimalist parkour.

The entire piece, three minutes plus, was put together in under an hour, with Miranda as choreographer. The process was clearly from the world of dance, with the vocabulary borrowing from parkour basics. We began in our chairs, and we each came up with our own three to five movements involving the chair, which we then stitched into our own movement phrases. Here and throughout, Miranda's role was not to give us any specific movement, but rather to help us make choices from what we'd come up with and to structure it in a dynamic way. She focused on building on moments that worked best; when she saw a dynamic relationship developing she sought to bring focus to it.

Next we tackled the table, some of us literally. Again we came up with a variety of movements, picked our favorites, and sequenced them, but since there were four of us and only one table, we also had to work out the timing of our movement in coordination with the whole group.

The final stage of our magnum opus involved descending two short nearby stairs, finding different ways to get down them. Clearly this was an example not of moving efficiently through the stairs space, but of transforming them into a plaything. Again, we had to coordinate this with one another and eventually work toward an ending of sorts.

The modernist performance philosophy behind all this is that dramatic relationships and moments arise from the dynamics of these structured improvisations without any specific intention being imposed. Performers interact, patterns emerge. Rather than the piece telling a story, the audience is free to take whatever narrative from it they like. For me as a participant this went against my clown and actor instincts. I had to fight the urge to seek out eye contact and grow it into a psychological relationship with another character. It was hard not to think in terms of status and control, hard not to want to transform a physical movement into a physical comedy bit. (Yeah, yeah, that's also the story of my life, but we'll save that for another post...)

While the end result (below) was clearly a "process piece," I liked the process and can see its potential for developing all kinds of material. And yes, the rain did let up and we did get an audience of 30 to 40 people, all of whom gave us a standing ovation because it was still too wet to sit down. All I could think of was the storied tradition of the National Theatre: Gielgud, Richardson, Olivier and now Towsen.






In Performance with the French duo Gravity Style: Quartet
For the weekend performances of Quartet, UPG was joined by
two leaders of France's Gravity Style, Charles Perrière, and Malik Diouf, original members with David Belle in the group Yamakasi, back in Lisse in the 90s. They've been collaborating with UPG for several years and on the weekend put together several semi-improvised performances.

UPG's interest in mixing genres is echoed in Gravity Style's concept of gravity art: "Around the art of dispalcement (parkour), the sportive and artistic discipline popularized by the Luc Besson Film, Yamakasi, it brings together a wide range of physical performance such as acrobatics and urban dance and integrates them into different artistic contexts."

The performance of Quartet they did later that night was scaled back somewhat because everything was still quite wet, but it went over very well with the audience. The video below, shot with a handy-dandy Flip camera, is from far enough back to take in the whole space, so you lose some detail. To remedy that, here are some photos of the performance taken by Riley that help balance things out.






And here's the video (about 11 minutes):





Parkour and Physical Comedy
If UPG's choreography eschews character and plot, and other manifestations of parkour are self-expression, what does it all have to do with physical comedy? Physical comedy as a specific genre is usually based on meticulously planned out characters, stories, and blocking. Still, I do see some useful connections:

• Movement vocabulary
The most obvious link is between the acrobatics seen in a lot of parkour and that robust branch of physical comedy that emulates the daredevil antics of Lloyd and Keaton and likes large spaces and big movement.

• Intention, or, why did the chicken cross the road?
The parkour traceur's intention is a given, the desire to get from point A to point B as efficiently as possible. The physical comedian is more likely to be running from someone. Speed is an issue, the intention is survival.

• Obstacles and Inventiveness
The obstacles are what make parkour and physical comedy interesting. Both the traceur and the physical comedian are creative in their solutions to overcoming these obstacles. While these solutions are efficient and "simple," they would not be the obvious choice for most people, which just reinforces the eccentric nature of the physical comedian's character. Likewise, it is usually the clown's m.o. to overcome obstacles in an inventive way, even when not working in a physical mode.

A textbook example of parkour-style physical comedy is the climactic scene in Keaton's College (1927), where Buster — an abject failure as a college athlete — must make a mad dash to his girlfriend's dormitory room, where she is being held captive by an overly-insistent male rival. The intention is clear, the obstacles many. In the course of his rescue mission, he successfully makes use of many of the sports techniques that had eluded him on the playing field.



It should be noted that the pole vault was the only time in his silent-film career that Keaton used a stunt double.

Not only can physical comedy make use of parkour-style leaping and bounding, it can also make fun of it. Here's a sharp parody of Douglas Fairbanks by Will Rogers. You may think of Rogers as primarily a verbal comedian and political satirist, but he had a long career in silent movies as well, making fifty of them! In this excerpt from Big Moments from Little Pictures (1924), Rogers channels his inner clown as he offers us a rather fey Robin Hood showing his very merry men the fine art of jumping.




And then there's this parkour parody from the current season of the tv sitcom The Office:



Good ending, but I gotta admit it, overall I thought Rogers was a lot funnier.


Physical Comedy in the 21st Century??
Since we're doing some genre-bending here, I'll close with a cool video by Vidéo El Dorado that combines Mayan ruins, parkour, visual effects (time remapping ), and of course more monkeys. Not sure if it fits my "physical comedy in the 21st century" category because it's not exactly comedy, but it is cool. Did I mention that it has monkeys?




Well, that's a lot of stuff to throw at you. I hope it makes sense to all you old folks! I know I'm a novice here and just scratching the surface, so here's some more info for the insatiable:

Links
• Jump Four — a 2003 BBC documentary about parkour that features French free runners leaving their trace on London's landscape. This is available on YouTube, segmented into five parts.
• Parkour-Videos.com — "all the best videos of parkour"
• Parkourpedia — a reference source compiled by the Australian Parkour Association
• American Parkour — site for AMK
• Training Videos — also from the AMK site
• New York Parkour — site for NYPK, parkour group for NYC / New Jersey area
• Sandbag — parkour events staged all over the world to promote the fight against climate change
• Point B — a 2009 documentary about parkour
• Parkour in Casino Royale — James Bond chases Sebastian Foucan. I'd like this a lot better if there weren't so many cuts undermining the believability of the leaps. I want to see the take-off, flight, and landing all in the same shot, thank you very much!
• Update (3-15-2010): Parkour Motion Reel — from Vimeo, a short but cool hand-animated flip book about parkour.