On Parkour and Punk

A version of this piece originally appeared in the parkour zine Once Is Never in May 2022.

Beginning a practice of training parkour over the past year or so has been nothing short of life-changing for me.  As a queer punk trans girl who has always been too weird and sensitive for the culture of sports–and who possessed almost no natural athletic gifts–it was almost unthinkable that a physical activity could be anything but torment or drudgery.  I could wax poetic for a long time about the myriad benefits parkour has brought into my life, not least of all forging a joyful relationship to moving and exerting my body for the first time.  But when someone recently asked me simply, “What is parkour?” I found myself at a loss for a satisfactory reply.

Of course I know the pat responses: ‘efficient A to B movement’, ‘a sport that involves running, jumping, climbing over obstacles’, ‘the French martial art of running away’ and so on.  But none of these really seem to capture either some universal essence or what parkour is to me.

In attempting to answer this question adequately, something I’ve learned is that I am not an originalist.  For starters, we could debate parkour’s exact provenance; the most widely accepted narrative, of course, is to regard David Belle as the father of parkour and the rest of the Yamakasi as a supporting cast.  Yet in the history given in Julie Angel’s Breaking The Jump as well as the films Jump London and Generation Yamakasi, I see a much more collective and collaborative process–and there was plenty of intragroup discord surrounding both the philosophy of their training and its direction, almost from the jump.  (See what I did there?)

At some point in the process of sifting through these different attitudes and values, I realized I’d done this once before.  For over twenty years I’d wrestled with the question of what it meant to be punk.  Was it in being fiercely dedicated to DIY, egalitarian art spaces?  Or in being raw and real and not too concerned with polish?  Or was it just in figuring out which people and artists were Truly Punk, and forsaking all others?

Just as I’ve been doing with parkour, I tried to answer this question by trying to follow the thread to its source.  And lo, there was never a consensus among punks, either, about anything that constituted either punk music or culture: not about definitions, or aesthetics, or values.  Of course, there were values and aesthetics that had drawn me in in the first place, as I mentioned above; but many of those features only emerged later in the culture’s development.  In fact, some of the early examples of what would come to be known as punk were barely recognizable as such to me; interesting, but not particularly compelling.

And many of the characters who were around were not who I would think of as my people.  There were those a bit too enthralled with shock and sensationalism at whatever cost, or those a bit too comfortable “ironically” espousing fascism.  It took me a long time to understand that in order to find my place within punk, I had to be an active participant in the conversation about what punk is, and could and should be.  Which, paradoxically, meant that I had to believe in my rightful claim to being punk in the first place.

I’m trying to really own that I can do the same with parkour.  It’s a relief that I don’t have to subscribe to an ethos of arrogant superiority, masochism and hypermasculinity vaunted by certain old school heads, including David Belle; that there are counter streams of thought within parkour that are equally valid, of radical inclusivity and treating one’s body with care and even gentleness.  But I don’t just want to reject some notions and embrace others; I want to take the meanings that resonate most and sharpen them.  And the new meanings I make will be informed by who I already am–among other things, a middle-aged anarchist punk trans woman.  So here’s my first go of it.

Parkour is a movement practice first developed in France in the 1990s, predominantly by Black and Vietnamese youth from immigrant communities.  These youth were profoundly shaped by the forces of patriarchy, white supremacy and colonization as they played out in their built environment, in their families and in their psyches and identities.  There isn’t a single unifying meaning to what parkour is at its core: not efficiency, not strength, not usefulness, not creativity.  But what we do seem to agree on is that our movement means something, and it isn’t merely exercise, recreation or competitive achievement.  To train parkour is to strive for this meaning.

For me, then, parkour is about claiming public space for things other than working and shopping.  Parkour is both discipline and play.  Parkour is knowing that as long as I’m alive, I have a body, and I’d do well to start enjoying it, better late than never.  Parkour is giving as much to my body as I expect it to give me.  Parkour is building rapport and trust with my body.  Parkour is knowing that my body likes to be pushed, as long as I honor that it has limits.  Parkour is always seeking the edge of what is possible, and accepting again and again that the edge is real and must be respected.

All of these meanings are partly derived from ongoing conversations with other parkour practitioners, but in reformulating them I’ve made them my own.  These were the threads I chose because they helped me to grow while also integrating with all the identities I already had.  That is to say, to me parkour is–or can and should be–egalitarian, liberatory, DIY, raw and real.

Parkour is punk as fuck.