Use It or Lose It

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Hey, I'm 63 and still going strong, still doing triathlons and still teaching physical comedy, but I'm nothing compared to this grand dame, Johanna Quaas.



Yes, you got that right — 86! If that doesn't inspire you, I don't know what will.

Thanks to Kendall Cornell for the link!

Stunt Tips from Jackie Chan: Everyday Objects

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One of the things I like the most about Jackie Chan is his imaginative use of ordinary household items in his fight and chase scenes. In this clip he talks about it and shows a few examples.

Click here for a previous Jackie Chan stunt tip.

Stunt Tips from Jackie Chan: The Wire

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Here's an interesting clip of Jackie Chan explaining how he enhances some of his less spectacular falls.

Jos Houben: The Art of Laughter

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It takes more than a little bravery to tell an audience outright that you are going to explain to them how comedy works and that you intend to make them laugh a lot in the process, even suggesting that they don't have much choice in the matter. But if they don't laugh, you lose on two counts. And it takes a lot of talent, training, and practice to pull it off as well as Jos Houben did Tuesday night in New York at an evening hosted by the Alliance Française as part of their Crossing the Line performance series. Yes, lots of laughs and a standing ovation.

Jos is one part vintage vaudevillian and one part Lecoq-trained movement specialist, a dynamic combination that infuses The Art of Laughter with a whole lot of fun and just as much insight. With only a chair, table, bottle, glass, hat, and napkin as props, this "master class" breaks physical comedy down into manageable chunks, building both the gags and the theory as he goes.

The bottom line for Jos is the human body — "none of you showed up here tonight without yours" — and especially the significance of our verticality, which our egos so readily equate with dignity. Some of this reminds me of a Tom Leabhart lecture-demo on the inner experience / physical manifestation work of François Delsarte, which certainly influenced modern mime, but with Jos the backbone is clearly connected to the funny bone. Many of the comic moments that arise, from the simplest trip to disastrously awkward encounters with the opposite sex, are funny because of our deviance from this vertical ideal.

Jos starts with the simplest physical comedy moves: a trip, a hand fumbling an object, a shoe flying off. How do we react to these? What if others are watching?? He builds these blunders into various combinations and then lets them occur in simple situations with the other. What happens between a man and a woman? Between two guys?

There are a few clips on YouTube, and I offer four below to give you a taste, but they fail to convey the overarching narrative that makes the whole of this presentation far greater than its (excellent) parts. If you have the opportunity to see this show live — and Jos does perform it in English and in French all over the world — do not miss it!





Preview, in French:




Again in French, two more sustained sequences. The first selection focuses on body parts, starting with the pelvis.




The second clip demonstrates creating "an accident" and building it into a sequence.




Some Links:
• Read Jos's impressive bio here.
• See the work of Jos's students from the École Jacques Lecoq, performing at the Louvre, in this previous post.
• Web site for the École Jacques Lecoq, where Jos currently teaches.
• See Jos in New York, November 9th thru December 4th, in Fragments, short pieces by Samuel Beckett, directed by Peter Brook.

Movement Training for Actors

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

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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.

Tables are Funny — Live from Barcelona! #2

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Pure acrobatics operates in a precise world where time and 3D space intersect in ways even Einstein could not have imagined without vaudeville. As my old Russian circus teacher Gregory Fedin put it, "if you are able to see space, the acrobat has to go through it... go with the curves, like the tracks of a railway."

Physical comedy often hitches a ride along these same curvy tracks, but it also inhabits the messier world of people and objects, of personality and ambition and conflict. When I teach physical comedy, I like to play with this material world as much as possible, with oddball characters at odds with one another, and with all kinds of man-made stuff — chairs and tables, stairs and doors, walls and windows, and with every object that dares challenge our pride with the label "unbreakable." So here in Barcelona we’ve been developing a vocabulary of theatrical acrobatics by using our partner's weight and mass to create counterbalances and human levers. Add to that an exploration of the material world starting with our old friends, chairs and tables. As I mentioned in my previous post, within two hours we had reconfigured four chairs and one table (and by reconfigured I mean smashed to smithereens). No, not a record for my classes; not even close.

Which brings us to this post — Tables are Funny — and a new blog feature that looks at how physical comedy makes use of specific elements within its real-world environment. Stay tuned for Chairs are Funny, Doors are Funny , etc.. I’ll be combining clips of imaginative work from the past with some how-to instruction that should give an idea of how I approach this when I teach hands-on physical comedy.

I first became enamored of table tricks while on the Hubert Castle Circus in the late 70s, where a French troupe, the Gaspards, performed a sure-fire act with many of the tricks you'll see in the videos below. I don't know whatever happened to the Gaspards, I've never uncovered any footage of them, but many other acts have performed very similar routines, which have surfaced in various video archives.


Tables for Dummies
Some obvious things we know about tables:
• they are flat, so we should be able to walk, roll, or lie down on them just as we do on the ground
• they are elevated, so we have the possibility of vertical movement to and from them, including from the table to a higher target
• they can be a surface for working or a gathering place for eating, often bringing people together in a festive and sharing atmosphere
• if it's a dining table, a variety of objects — plates, cups, utensils, food — are placed on and eventually cleared away
• because we associate cleanliness with fine dining, human bodies on top of tables or hands other than our own contacting our food are simply unacceptable in polite company; let us not forget that it was standing on a kitchen countertop that precipitated movie Max's journey into the land of the Wild Things.
• many other structures share some of these characteristics with tables and are therefore eligible for similar treatment at the hands of the unrepentant physical comedian

As with most physical comedy elements, we can look at tables both from a purely physical point of view — what tricks can we perform on them? — and from a comedic angle — how do we make that funny? In fact, we pretty much have to do both, don’t we, or it won’t be physical comedy? Physical + comedy = physical comedy (more or less).

Tricks
We’ll see numerous variations on these in the videos that follow, but here’s a breakdown of the physical possibilities:
• diving, leaping or falling onto and off the table
• sliding onto, along, and off the table
• balancing in precarious positions on or from the table
• using the table as an obstacle, chasing around it, diving over or under it, etc.
• hiding under the table
• manipulating the objects on the table
• moving, manipulating or even destroying the table itself


Basic Table Technique:

The better the acrobat, the fancier the tricks possible on a table, but you have to begin with the basics. This is what I started them on here in Barcelona:

1. Forward Roll onto Table: Because you are working against gravity here rather than with it, you will need to initiate the roll with more force to push your hips up and over this higher center of gravity, but you will need less arm strength in the second half of the roll to cushion your landing. Be careful to get the hips up and straighten the legs (point those toes!) so you don 't scrape your shin bones on the edge of the table. Unless the table is too long, you should be able to come smoothly off the other end and onto your feet. From there you might go into another roll or into a front fall, as in the video below from my NCI class.



2. Backward Roll from Table: A back shoulder roll is actually easier than a symmetrical roll and also frees up your hands for other activities, such as balancing bowls of soup. First figure out where your butt will sit on the table so that your head is actually off the edge of the table and you are pivoting directly on the shoulders. Sit in the same spot every time and you should be fine. As you go over, think of your shoulders as the pivot point for your rotation and actually see the floor long before your feet make contact. If you are doing a symmetrical, two-hand back roll, push off hard and straighten those legs to avoid the edge of the table.

Here are two in a row, the first by Tony Curtis or his double, from the 1965 movie The Great Race.




3. Peanut Roll onto and off the Table:
[Peanut roll = partners holding each other's ankles.]
First of all you need to be able to perform a smooth peanut roll on the ground, and especially be able to keep the speed up. It's mostly timing and momentum, but some arm strength does help.
Doing it on and off the table looks a lot harder than it is. The person diving from the table needs to plant their partner's feet on the ground and to maintain tension in the arms to minimize the impact. The person sitting on the table can help a lot by resisting on their partner's legs. This is not difficult and, in fact, it's easy to execute the dive from the table in slow motion — admittedly not very spectacular, but a good starting point.

When rolling back onto the table, the partner doing the pulling should be fine so long as they use their butt on the table as a fulcrum and lift more with their legs than they yank with their arms. In the video below two NCI students who just learned the trick muscle their way through it. With more practice, using movement similar to a back extension roll (= back roll to a handstand) will allow the bottom person to make it easier for the lifter, and momentum will replace muscle. Here it is performed by Stefano Battai (Italy) and Giovanni Sanjiva Margio (Australia)




4. Slide Across the Table
This is everyone's favorite stunt! In the movies you might see it across the length of a saloon bar, though in this clip from a barroom brawl in The Great Race, it spans a stage catwalk and down some stairs.



You'll want a smooth laminated table top and will probably want to sprinkle some baby powder on it as well. The idea is to slide clear across the table and off the other side, your body in a slightly arched position, toes pointed. It can be done with no hands, but try starting by placing both hands on the table to boost you up there and push you forward. The hands can grab again to pull you off the end, but with a running start and minimum friction you won't even need to.

Sliding between the legs of one or more people who just happen to be standing on the table is pretty common, as is deliberately knocking objects off the table as you go. I still remember Charles Murray, in a class of mine in Athens, Ohio in the early 80s, sliding desperately across the table to get to a ringing telephone in time. (You see, back then we had these big loud telephones that sat on tables and didn't take messages and didn't tell you who the missed call was from... oh forget it, you wouldn't understand.)

A more common crowd-pleaser is the two-person table slide with the partners approaching from opposite directions. This can be dangerous if you get your signals crossed but is not particularly difficult so long as each person sticks to their side of the table. A demilitarized zone of a few inches is recommended.



An even funnier ending for the table slide is to maintain the swan dive position and belly flop to the ground rather than go into a roll:




5. Hair Pull onto Table
Everyone loves the hair pull, even those of us who are starting to get receding hairlines. In the politically incorrect Age of the Flinstones, caveman grabbed cavewoman by the hair and yanked her left and right, up and down. This was called courting. Nowadays we are only allowed to pretend. As in most stage combat — or as Joe Martinez aptly labeled it, Combat Mime — the "victim" initiates all the action, which keeps things safe and believable.

The basic move goes as follows. To make up for an ice age of discrimination, we'll let cavewoman do the honors.
• Cavewoman reaches her hand into the lushest region of caveman's hair, bringing her hand into a fist as she does so. The idea is to give the impression that she has gathered a clump of hair into that fist, but in fact she should have none.
• Fighting back, caveman grabs cavewoman's wrist in a futile attempt to disengage. What he is actually doing is pressing her wrist into his head because if we ever see a gap between her fist and his skull, the illusion is shattered.
• All movement, from a simple shake to dragging the whole body across the floor, must be initiated by the victim, aka the caveman. The cavewoman follows through, miming being the aggressor. This is both for safety purposes and to maintain the illusion.

Same technique for pulling someone up to the table.
• Cavewoman stands on the table, caveman on the floor.
• Cavewoman reaches down and grabs caveman's hair, as explained above. Caveman grabs her wrist. You may find a two-hand grip easier.
• Caveman plies and jumps to the table while cavewoman mimes being the cause of it all. While caveman may get some support from his woman's arm, the bottom line is still that fist and head cannot come apart.

In class we first tried this jumping to a chair just to get the movement down and our confidence up.

Here are the Three Ghezzi doing it (their full-act video can be seen later on in this post).




6. Ye Olde Tablecoth Pull
We've all tried pulling a table cloth out from underneath the dishes, but did you know it can be done with 4 plates supporting 4 legs of a chair and a person sitting in that chair? The principles remain the same, and are all designed to minimize friction:
• use a smooth table with a sharp edge
• use a tablecloth with no edge seams
• let the tablecloth hang down on your side but not off the back
• put fruit in bowls, etc.; crockery is more likely to stay in place if it's heavier
• taller objects are more precarious, so place them closer to the near edge of the table so they have less contact time with the tablecloth
• pull quickly downwards with both hands as you step back

And, yes, this is me with hair (Toronto, 1989).



And, yes, those front two plates were supposed to stay put. It looks to me like my yank was slightly up rather than slightly down. Don't you make the same mistake! An even worse mistake would be to ask a horse to do a human's job, as in this early Max Linder film:





A Table Safety Note:
Most tables these days fold up. You probably don't want this to happen while you are on them. When I use this type, I like to brace the opposing legs with a 2" x 2" wedged between them so they cannot fold inward. Of course in a workshop setting you can always use a spare human:





Table Acrobatic Acts

No doubt tables have been funny ever since they grew that third leg, and certainly hit their stride with the fourth. I have no idea which caveman did the first table comedy acrobatic act, but such shenanigans were common by the time vaudeville came along, and the black & white photograph at the top of this post is indeed of Buster Keaton's father, Joe. Their vaudeville act was the Three Keatons (that's Buster on the left) and Joe was the Man with the Table. "He would dive on it headfirst, turn handsprings along its top, and then from apogee plunge head down almost to the floor before, with a catlike turn, he would land on his feet."

It's unlikely we'll ever discover footage of the Three Keatons, but Buster never tired of doing his trademark table fall, a bizarrely brilliant piece of business which he may or may not have gotten from dear old dad. To get up onto the table, he places one foot up there so that leg is now parallel to the ground. Hmm...that worked well enough, so why not just do the same thing with the other leg? Here he is, still demonstrating it well into his senior years.




Through the miracles of DVDs and YouTube, we do have some complete table acrobatic acts that hearken back to vaudeville. The oldest piece I have is from the early days of television, performed by two comedy acrobats on the Colgate Comedy Hour. I think they may be the Schaller Brothers, who also had a trampoline act, but not sure..




Fast forward to 1966, where Allan Sherman ("Hello muddah, hello fuddah...") is introducing The Three Ghezzis at the London Hippodrome. They combine standard table tricks with clown carpenter shtick to create some high-level mayhem. Pay attention at the 1:40 mark as one of the Ghezzis reprises Buster Keaton's table fall.




Next up are the Stanek, performing in the Tarzan Zerbini Circus (USA) in 1989. (I had not heard of them and the announcer seems to be calling them by another name.)



More recent are Quartour Stomp, who go more in and out of the comedy in order to show off their formidable acrobatic prowess.



Our final full-length piece comes from the excellent web site Circopedia This act by the Fumagalli in the 2007 edition of the Big Apple Circus is more clown than comedy acrobatics, perhaps a bit thin in both areas, but interesting enough.




Shorter Table Bits (the bits are shorter, not the tables)

The Launching Pad
Usually we descend from a table. Usually. Here's Buster Keaton cornered by Joe Roberts in his short film, The Goat (1921). Buster has succeeded in getting invited home by the girl he's been chasing, only to discover that her father is the cop who's been chasing him all day.




The Folding Table
On a sillier note, here's Harpo Marx, thwarting an attempt to fold the legs of a card table.




The Mobile Table
Usually a table is stable, but there's no reason it can't be moved and manipulated, as in this brilliant sequence from the Beijing Opera sketch, The Crossroads, or, The Fight in the Dark.




Breakaway Tables
And finally, it is of course possible to destroy a table. Breakaway furniture has been a mainstay of physical comedy since the invention of the 3-legged stool, and I think when I asked Jango months before my workshop to get me some tables and chairs, that must have been what he thought I meant, because they all kept breaking.

In the 19th century, the Hanlon-Lees were famous for breaking anything and everything: trains and stage coaches, and of course ceilings and tables...


In The Great Race saloon brawl, they break everything within sight: chairs, tables, windows, mirrors, doors, stairs, railings, and two balconies. Here's the most explosive table smash:




On a lamer note, here's the Brit comic Spike Milligan crashing onto a card table in his multi-cultural "waiter, there's a fly in my soup" routine, in this variation making fun of the Irish:




Table That Story

Now after looking at those videos you might think that all table tricks are good for is a highly technical comedy acrobatic act. As much fun as such acts are, they require highly skilled acrobats, which very few of my students are and which I never was. Furthermore, the 10-tricks-a-minute approach is fine for presentational acts but not for routines with a narrative structure where falls, flips, and nosedives have to be motivated.

So let's look at the use of table tricks within a storyline....

First up is Joe's Restaurant, a 10-minute piece created by and starring Christopher Agostino, Laine Barton, Aaron Watkins, Joe Killian and Mari Briggs, and performed at the 2nd NY International Festival of Clown-Theatre (1985). The piece actually grew out of work in a physical comedy class I taught and was reshaped and directed by Steve Kaplan. I remember Steve liked to say "what's the joke here?" in an attempt to sort through all the shtick and hone in on the primary comedy angle in a scene. This piece was more a series of tricks than a story until it was agreed that the joke was that there were not enough chairs for all the customers.



Joe's Restaurant has dozens of tricks, but this is not the only way to go. Instead of trying to string together a series of table tricks into a substantial sequence, it's equally valid to use a single technique at just the right moment in just the right away. The move doesn't have to be hard, it just has to work within the context of the piece. Here's a good example from this past weekend's Cabaret Cabron at the Nouveau Clown Institute. In this funeral home sketch, Giuseppe Vetti and Salvatore Caggiari, who in real life work together as as Il Duo Dorant, reprise the Dead or Alive motif, using just a few partner and table moves from my class. This was put together in one afternoon after three physical comedy classes. Giuseppe is the undertaker, Salvatore the body.

Because this was shot with a basic Flip camera and from a bad angle, first a couple of high-rez stills by Manel Salla "Ulls" to set the mood:




You can find a dozen more stills here, but onto the video:

Jon Davison's Encyclopaedia of Clown

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I had the pleasure to meet British clown performer and teacher Jon Davison this summer in London and to speak with him about his research into the workings of the performing clown. For the past couple of years he has been undertaking an International Clown Research Project, in residency at London University and at the Escola de Clown de Barcelona. He is in the process of compiling a sort of Encyclopaedia of Clown. I say sort of encyclopaedia, because part of what he's doing is analytic writing and part of it is "a performance designed to test, compare and demonstrate the wide variety of forms and structures in clown performance."

Here are some of the issues he's tackling:
what is a clown in the 21st century?
what do they do?
what are they for?
do clowns change over history and across cultures?
what is their true history?
how can we train clowns better?

more polemically...
why are women clowns underrepresented?
why are people obsessed with red noses?
what myths about "traditional" and "post-Lecoquian" clowns need to be thrown into the dustbin?
why is the fad for being afraid of clowns not altogether a bad thing?


Check out his blog and his web site for some more food for thought.

My Life as a Parkour Traceur

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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.