The practice of Parkour

For starters, parkour is a training discipline or sport that requires participants to move rapidly through urban landscapes with fluidity, by jumping, running and with other extreme stunts. And performance parkour (which is commonly known as 2PK) blends the core skills of contemporary dances and parkour. Urban Playground, a popular UK-based performance-parkour company, which has travelled across several continents performing and holding workshops, visited Chennai recently.

The team is known for its signature performance called Steam. Now, UPG, in association with Chennai-based Parkour Circle, brought about a similar performance called Indian Steam, by indianising a few scenes of the show. It was backed by the Arts Council of England’s Reimagine India Fund and the British Council. The UPG team consists of Miranda Henderson, Alister O’loughlin, Malik Diouf, Sasha Biloshitsky, Chris Umney and Melissa Humler.

Talking to DC, Alister O’loughlin, says the parkour scene in Chennai is well-developed. “Chennai parkour has been doing loads over the last decade to build the practice and the profile here. Also, it has a great online presence, which we follow and there’s clearly a lot going on. We met traceurs (people who practice parkour) in Auroville too, but we’ve not seen so many signs of active communities elsewhere.” However, unlike other countries the women indulging in the sport is negligible, according to him. “Women seem comparatively under-represented compared to people performing parkour in Europe, America, and Australia. There are active female groups in the Middle East too, in Thailand, Malaysia… so where are the traceuses here?”

Talking about their association with Parkour Circle, he asserts, “We were introduced by a mutual friend, Andy Day, who is probably the best-known parkour photographer, globally. Andy recommended Parkour Circle as a community that was developed enough already to make appropriate partners to the project.”

The UPG and Parkour Circle have also conducted various workshops throughout Tamil Nadu and when asked about things that are taught in the classes, he says, “We start with some basic principles of parkour — how to approach the set (and this could apply to both built and natural environments). Then we give some specific techniques which each contain principles that can be applied in many different circumstances, given some imagination. Lastly, we play games that move us from parkour into performance-parkour; sharing space, working in groups or partnerships, following a line of movement through an environment which is filled with other bodies moving and focussing on how this sharing of space becomes a tool for communication, as well as personal exploration.” Alister also says, when parkour is sometimes seen as a subversive and anti-social act in Europe, he was stunned when he entered Puducherry, “I was struck by the parkour tactics employed by everyone (drivers and pedestrians alike) all of the time. Everyone is looking for that perfect combination of safe, efficient, fluid movement and dealing with obstacles in the process. This is how we define parkour.”