Parkour: Daredevil movement at the Fringe

In 1970, the postmodern choreographer Trisha Brown staged her literal Man Walking Down the Side of a Building. Forty years later, thanks to the movement style known as Parkour, dancers now leap off buildings.

Parkour, developed by street-runners (traceurs) in Parisian banlieus, combines gymnastics, acrobatics and martial arts with daredevil spatial negotiation. Its practitioners employ these elements while running freestyle across city landscapes, leaping between tenement rooftops and scaling the levels of parking garages, shopping malls, office parks— any landscape that presents obstacles requiring navigational negotiation.

Aside from its requisite daredevil attitude, a sense of freestyle touch-and-go interplay with the urban environment defines the genre. This doesn't mean that Parkour resists choreography or planned execution. The traceurs I've known might survey the landscape with the same attention to detail as a cartographer. Diving off a 14-foot wall and into a somersault across a dumpster generates the same thrill even when you've done it a dozen times before. (For an example, click here.)

Parkour quickly spread from Paris to London to North America, where it has taken root in Seattle and New York— but strangely enough, only marginally in skateboard-heavy Philadelphia, despite its profusion of urban parks and outdoor sculpture.

Few Philadelphia dance or movement companies have incorporated Parkour. When the Montreal-based 7 Fingers company presents Traces during this year's Live Arts & Fringe Festival, it will offer the first piece in Philadelphia (to my knowledge) that utilizes it.

That choreographers picked up on a new movement style should surprise no one. What they can do with Parkour remains another question.

Potential for injury

Unlike other urban movement forms that transfer easily to a blank stage (like hip-hop), Parkour requires a structural landscape full of obstacles requiring navigation. Companies such as Nadia Lesy's Brooklyn-based Bulletrun have solved this problem in one of two ways: by installing scaffolding and boxes to create ledges, elevations and obstacles in a traditional stage space; or by setting a work in an urban park or abandoned warehouse or factory. It's no surprise that Traces will be performed at the Merriam Theatre, which offers Philadelphia's deepest stage.

Training dancers in Parkour presents another challenge. Choreographers must either hire traceurs to perform in their pieces, or they must ask existing company members to learn (one more) incredibly dangerous system of body mechanics and movement with tremendous potential for injury.

To be sure, a choreographer like Elizabeth Streb already demands a certain degree of peril in her scaffold divings and leapings through glass. And many dancers already train in gymnastics or acrobatics. But neither of these latter styles provides a true analog for Parkour. The few gymnasts I know who experimented with Parkour had to abandon much of their training; even straightforward Parkour movements like flips and butterfly twists differ greatly from their counterparts on a floor mat.

But is it dance?

Although Parkour can take place anywhere, any piece that lacks a sense of navigational improvisation threatens to undermine Parkour's central concept. So the aesthetic question is: Can dance incorporate this movement style? What can Parkour offer to dance, other than the thrill-ride spectacle of bodies springing through space?

I, for one, am eager to see how 7 Fingers (or any movement company) can incorporate such an explosive, jaw-dropping and athletic series of feats into staged movement.

In the best-case scenario, Parkour could transform dance much the way hip-hop did in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Companies devoted to the hi-hop genre— like Philadelphia's Rennie Harris Puremovement—flourished, and other choreographers created works that fused hip-hop with jazz, tap and ballet. Several sub-disciplines sprang forth from hip-hop's breakdancing roots, from the martial arts of tricking to clowning and krumping.

Whether Parkour proves as fertile for choreographers and dance lovers or fizzles out as yesterday's fad may not matter. The arrival of this innovative new movement style offers one more reminder that we live in exciting times for the creation of dance.♦


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