When I first came to this site I loved parkour. It was all I wanted to do but the more I learned about it and learned what the community thought about it I began to feel restricted about what I could say about it. There appeared to be very rigid rules and guidelines about what parkour was and what it wasn't and I found this to be completely opposite to what parkour should be.
People think that efficiency is the most important thing that you can do, any other moves that aren’t efficient are not being parkour and are something different, and they need to be defined as something else other then parkour and people loved to point this out. This system of “parkour-or-not” destroys imagination and that's what I loved so much about parkour when I started. If I saw something I could do what ever I wanted to it jump it, go under it, flip over it, go through it or hang on and shimmy my way across. But because there are people who believe parkour is one certain thing, they also pushed there thoughts that there is only one correct way to get around a specific obstacle in a certain situation. Why must we always train as if we are being chased, why can't we just do what we want express ourselves through movement, not in the interpretive dance way but in the way that our bodies can do anything we want with them and prove that through an art form that we've all come here to learn.
I think that's why I’ve come here and wrote this because I didn't want to make a thread due to the ridicule I may face, by saying my personal thoughts on something people feeling very passionately about. For the few who see this I no longer want to be known for doing parkour if anything I do l'art du deplacement, which is the original and really is the same thing as parkour without the strict guidelines.
This may mean I can no longer call myself a traceur even if I could do too begin with. I did consider it a very cool title to have and to strive for, but a word isn't worth crippling your creativity. What Dave said to me the other day really hit home with me. He said parkour was the ultimate competition sport where two people race through a city but nobody wants to compete in this way. Which okay that's all fair and good they have free-running for that and it’s better suited because they also get rated on style and other categories that wouldn't immediately apply to parkour the way people see it. It was the thought of two people racing through a city that kind of stuck with me though.
We have to go out looking for good spots to train, the majority of the city is completely inaccessible through any means simply because cities are made of very tall flat surface buildings and long straight streets. Alright you could pull off a few moves here and there but in the long run a good knowledge of parkour wouldn't help you against someone who has a good knowledge of the street lay outs. In fact MovNat seems to have the right idea, in the wild you have so many real uses for parkour techniques plus others. I'm not saying parkour is only about urban use which it's not but no one will ever have a good continuous run as you've seen in the movies simply because the cites we live in don't have such a fluid connection of parkour accessible locations.
P.S. This is just personal opinion and the way I've been feeling lately. 22/3/2010
-Maybe this belongs as a blog entry? |
Pac