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Spencer Yan
Modernism Through Art and Theatre
30 July 2014
J Kim, C Grimes

The noon sun hanging precariously in the sky above the rooftops. The buzz and hum of
the city below, amplified through the canyoned echo of the concrete jungle. A cold wind blows,
and a pigeon lands on a ledge beside me, three hundred feet above the ground. The open
blackness of the roof beckons towards me. Step once. Step twice. Jump. The seconds hang in the
air, gravitys rainbow. Birds in flight. The landing is hard, and strains the soles of my feet with
pain, but the impact is absorbed as the body responds to the shock, rolling forward. The sky
looms and lurches above me, hard and clear. Feet and hands working in tandem, I rise and
continue running. There is nothing but mass, fluidity and compressibility. There is nothing but
freedom.
Parkour, from the French le parcours (the course), is the art of efficient movement
within inefficient space. In a world inundated with geospatial interference from garbage cans
to park benches to hanging gardens to fences movement is largely confined to pre-established
paths in order to preserve the semblance of communal order. Whether such paths are roads for
automobiles, trails and sidewalks for pedestrians, railroad tracks for subway cars and trains, or
bicycle paths for cyclists, movement in the modern world has become so rigidly defined that it
has become in many places unnecessarily complex and at times, downright convoluted. Anyone
who has ever attempted to navigate the public transportation system in any major American city
can pay testament to this fact.
Parkour solves the problem of inefficient transportation by deconstructing human
movement to its most basic foundation: movement simultaneously restricted to and liberated
through the human body as sole vehicle of motion, with emphasis on individual willpower and
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efficacy as means of navigation. While it is very much utilitarianistic in its ambitions, it is not
however altogether divorced from a physiokinesthetic grace and aesthetic which very much
classifies within the broad domain of art. In both its goals and its underlying philosophy, it
fundamentally aligns with modernism in that its primary motive is the affirmation of the power
of man over his environment, emphasizing the ability to create, improve and utilize the
environment to maximum efficiency. It represents a vision of modernism in which the artist (or,
in parkour terminology, the traceur, or tracer - a title which in itself raises interesting linguistic
associations with the role of the runner as simultaneous artistic genesis and audience to his/her
environment) embraces his or her world as it is, rather than through the confinement of any
particular medium. What Pollock attempted to capture in the graceful splatters and arcs of his
compositions the traceur experiences as physical phenomonon: nature not diluted through a layer
of paint splattered onto a canvas or the brutalist curves of a metal sculpture, but experienced in
the purest sense - through direct interaction with the interface of reality.
The traceur, then, is simultaneous artist and audience, as framed within the paradigm of
modernism: artist, in the sense that s/he is navigating (interpreting) the environment through a
specific chosen course of action in a conscious decision resembling the painters choice of
colours and forms, or the dancers choice of steps and half-turns; and audience, in the sense that
s/he is directly experiencing the project of art prescribed via movement. The most comparable
experience within the frame of traditional art would be either theatre or dance. Unlike more static
disciplines such as painting, sculpture or architecture, dance and theatre add the element of time.
The work can be enjoyed while it is created/performed, yet afterwards it disappears and leaves
no trace, as the flight of birds across the sky. Memories of traceurs flitting through an urban
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landscape like silent birds, and memories of ghosts spinning to a haunting melody, are all that
remain after the performance is done.
Parkour also fundamentally embraces the ideology of resistance which runs through the
heart of the modernist movement. Modernist art rejects traditional form and convention in favour
of bold individual freedom, with emphasis on the deconstruction of systems and societal notions
of aesthetic order. It espouses the liquidation of systems through the deliberate subversion of
each systems rules from within: for example, where the abstract expressionists utilize the canvas
as a means of destroying the notion of a canvas in order to a prove a point, the traceur utilizes
the environment as a means of simultaneously demonstrating the inherent flaws presented by the
environment (in the form of seemingly inaccessible spaces and obstacles) and exploiting them to
his/her own advantage. As painters such as Magritte and Dali sought to dissemble the banalities
of modern life by rendering them in nearly hyperrealistic detail, parkour strips away the banality
through the aestheticization of everyday objects and routines, turning mundane objects into
objects of navigation and traversal and mundane routines into routines of varied creativity and
strategic exercise.
It is in this act of reappropriation that parkour takes on the full qualifications as a work of
modernist art. Though markedly materialist philosophers such as Marx and Benjamin would
argue that there is no return to an authentic existence - in other words, a state of being in society
in which ones actions, desires, and general consciousness are independent from the influence of
social structures - that is not the purpose of either parkour, or modernism in general. Neither is
free from social relations, as both are reactions and thus products of such worlds which bred first
their existence, and then perhaps their necessity. Neither seeks to be independent from their
respective systems, either; rather, they work by constructing different dialectics with their
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respective environments, dialogic engagements in which the balance of power is concentrated on
the artist/audience rather than the origin of the dialogue, the system itself. Parkour is based
around the activity of self-discovery and personal revelation - each traceur discovers a personal
experience of freedom through navigating different, self-defined paths through their
environments, a discourse in itself which leaves room for each individual to interpret the
environment on his or her own terms. It is modernism at its finest; it does not promise a return to
an authentic existence free from social relations that so many have attempted to reach but have
never come close to replicating; but rather, it provides a way for individuals within the modern
world to renegotiate their artistic experience and ways of thinking about these interactions within
the confines of the unbreakable society, but simultaneously also outside of it. As a work of
modernist art, parkour takes on a different rationale by rejecting the efficiency and economic
logic engendered in pre-determined urban spaces. It appropriates space within the system but
also beyond it by differently consuming the material society and in so doing rejecting the
arbitrary domination created by its rules and limitations.
As the traceur leaps from building to building, vaults over railings and across stairs, these
spectacular corporeal exercises further solidify a new way of approaching mundane space.
Parkour, although dependent upon the physical space of ones environment, moulds its own
territory constituting different legibilities of physical and kinesthetic environment. Thus, parkour
achieves the modernist goal of simultaneous coexistence with and liberation from an overruling
system, and becomes a practice of freedom - a way of liberating the practitioner from the
confines, both material and abstract, that are found and engendered in urban architectural space.

"The city was drowning in decay. Chaos, immorality. A message needed to be
sent, etched in blood for all the world to see. A warning. In the pursuit of my holy
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cause, I... did things, terrible things, unspeakable things. The world condemned
me, but it didn't matter, because I believed I was right and the world was wrong. I
believed I was the divine messenger. I believed I was... chosen"