parkour end times

It’s the story of civilisation, or at least one way of telling it. Something spontaneous springs up on the streets: unplanned, unpredicted, unstructured. It could be a new dance, a musical genre or a game. It tickles people’s imaginations. Word spreads. More and more people join in.
Then someone says: “Hey, this thing has become so big that we’d better agree some rules.” Someone else says: “It’s so big that there must be a way of making money out of it.” And a third person says: “It’s so big that we have to control it.” Thus is folk culture tamed, codified, gentrified — and, often, turned into an industry exploiting the very stratum of society that created it.


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It happened to jazz, soul, punk and rap. To football and basketball. To graffiti art. To breakdancing and skateboarding. To any number of street fashions. Could it now be happening to the most spectacular street craze of recent years? I mean parkour, the sport that sends kids leaping like gazelles over walls, balancing like pigeons on impossibly thin ledges, or swinging like apes from railings?

If so, that would be deeply paradoxical. The very essence of parkour is freedom. It was born in Lisses, a dull suburb of Paris, about 18 years ago — invented by two teenage boys, Sebastien Foucan and David Belle, who were literally kicking their heels with boredom. The word parkour is an elision of parc and courir — meaning park (or free) running.

Which is exactly what it is. There aren’t any rules, boundaries or pompous governing bodies. “Our motto,” Foucan famously declared, “is no violence, no competition, no groups, no chiefs.” Its adherents use the bleak furniture of the streets and the high-rise estates as their gymnasium. The idea — a wonderful one, in theory — is to transform the “negative energy” of rundown inner-city spaces into a positive expression of pure physical joy. The main tribal playground in London is the grim concrete underpasses around Waterloo and the South Bank.

And exponents need no equipment other than a pair of trainers with a good grip, and their own bodies. All the rest — the gravity-defying vaults between buildings, the cat-like confidence, the inch-perfect spatial awareness and seemingly miraculous sense of balance — comes from the inner discipline that parkour devotees cultivate with as much dedication as the martial arts masters of the Far East, or the tumbling acrobats of Cirque du Soleil.

www.parkour.ir

sources :

photo from www.parkour.de

text from http://women.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,27869-2470961_1,00.html

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