Mind you, I have zero interest in performing a lâché, a passé muraille, or a saut de chat. Yet I gather that, in my own sedentary way, I am what is called a traceur – a practitioner of parkour, i.e., the French art of movement. For I do move. I walk up stairs. I open doors. I work the remote. All this, it turns out, is an art, which makes me an artist.
Fortunately, accordingx to parkour philosophy, I’ll never be judged an inferior movement artist to David Belle, the founder of the discipline and the star of that 2004 kickass French action film District B13. That’s because pure parkour disdains competition, rules, and value judgments. Its agenda is mystically simple: efficient movement for its own sake.
Of course, in developing their abilities, devoted traceurs and traceuses (female parkour practitioners) look to move through more difficult obstacles than most people do. There’s not a building they’re not figuring out how to scale, a wall they’re not looking to vault. “We’re training in techniques that involve ultimate efficiency, proficiency, and consistency,” explained Randal Setzler, an Austin traceur. “It’s not about acrobatics. It’s about going from point A to point B in the swiftest, most efficient way possible.”
I met up with Setzler and his friend Chris Hartwell on the University of Texas campus – an excellent parkour playground. To illustrate his point, Setzler pointed to the bell tower, blocked from view by a 12-foot wall. Let’s say somebody is chasing you, Setzler said, and you have to get to the tower for safety. (Teaching and taking classes at UT, I can attest this happens often.) “The fastest way to get there is going over the wall.”
“Seriously? Why not just run around it?”
“Because going over it is faster, more efficient.”
I wasn’t buying it, so I challenged Setzler to race his friend. He’d somehow get over this looming wall. Hartwell would just race around it.
Now, a race is decidedly not in the spirit of parkour, but Setzler obliged me – scaling the wall in all of a second, smoking Hartwell’s ass, and showing me a thing or two.
“It’s all about forward movement, about not breaking that rhythm and flow,” he said. “You want to be silky smooth, your body in harmony with your environment.”
As a life metaphor, parkour has obvious appeal – the whole idea of overcoming obstacles, of never stopping, of always moving forward with maximum grace. But I had thought that parkour was a devil-may-care, spur-of-the-moment swashbuckling pursuit. With all their fancy terminology, training regimens, and touchy scruples about competition, I wonder if Setzler and other traceurs aren’t taking this rather too seriously. “It’s not just aimless monkeyshine shenanigans,” Setzler insisted. But it is. Of course it is. That’s the whole point. The traceur’s lofty fantasies of escaping hot pursuit through postapocalyptic settings are just that – fantasies. Why pretend otherwise?
As much as I admire the grace and derring-do of parkour traceurs, I’m thinking the first obstacle they need to get over is themselves.
This article appears in February 6 • 2009.