The gap had to have been about 10 feet wide. Arfel looked at it shouted, “I got this!” with a confident, almost smug tone. He paced himself back and forth across the Manhattan backdrop. His boys were cheering him on because they knew that if he made it they could too. On the outside he looked like a disciplined warrior with a task at hand, but in his eyes there was a hint of fear, a fear of not making the jump and getting injured. After a couple of run-throughs, Arfel ran up to the wall, vaulted into the air in a sitting position and landed with his fingers barely gripping the ledge and knees crashing against the wall. He made it. “I told you I got this!” says Arfel.
Arfel, 18, is part of a relatively new street sport called parkour. This is a sport blended with art that involves utilizing efficient but physically challenging movements to pass obstacles in the urban landscape. Some may say it looks like street gymnastics. The movements involve vaults over objects, jumps, precision-balance landing, martial arts rolls and climbing up walls. Parkour practitioners, also known as traceurs, get injuries, many of them severe, in the course of their activities. The high risk involved in parkour can be frightening and at times deadly, but it is a risk that traceurs are willing to take.
Originating in France with the original traceur, David Belle, who described parkour as “a natural method to train the human body to move forward quickly, making use of the environment that’s around us at any given time,” the sport has become a global phenomenon and recently has made its way into the United States in movies, TV shows and videos. Although the popularity worldwide is immense, Belle and other practitioners consider the sport an art.
“I saw a video of David Belle on YouTube about two years ago and thought that it was absolutely amazing. I knew I had try it out,” says José, 18, who is known as Vert to fellow traceurs Pyro and Ish.
The traceurs are part of a bigger network of metropolitan practitioners of the art called New York Parkour (NYPK). They organize themselves for practices or “jam sessions” in the metro area through the NYPK website (www.nyparkour.com), which is the hub of all of their activities. In fact, the website is how most of them met.
“We all met through the NYPK site. We were all looking at parkour as a way of expression, and we just met up and started practicing,” says Michael (Pyro), the youngest in the group at 16.
At first, most of the members hadn’t the slightest clue how to do parkour. With no formal instruction, Ish says, “we looked at the videos for instructions. We didn’t have instructors, only each other to learn from. If your technique was not right, we would help [you] out by what we saw in the videos.” Each member studied the videos for guidance. To make things harder, the videos were all in French.
In just a short time though, they became good enough to have people notice them. They usually have onlookers who are intrigued by the traceurs’ movements and manipulation of space that would otherwise be ordinary. Some people “think that we’re going to injure ourselves and kick us out of places. I can see why though,” says Vert.
In his essay Jump City: Parkour and Traces, David Thompson writes: “Parkour traceurs move against the backdrop of capital city, putting into relief what is there. Glimpsed against the rectangles of the buildings of the business sector, parkour is art set in its frame. This contemplation is as much about the city as about parkour and unruly wandering.”
The traceurs move through their favorite spots like those wandering nomads that Thompson writes about. They drop their backpacks, do some jumps, vaults and catwalks, and get tired or kicked out and move on to the next spot, the next urban backdrop, sometimes five in a day.
NYPK holds jam sessions on Roosevelt Island and Long Island, in Central Park and “some other secret spots we can’t say,” says Arfel. What traceurs look for in a good urban space to practice are low walls with ledges, small gaps, guardrails and steps. Basically anything that is shoulder high is game for a traceur.
Surprisingly the traceurs say they have an “OK” relationship with police officers. As a testament to that, when a New York City police officer passes through one of their favorite spots on Roosevelt Island, Vert and Arfel give each other a nod. Then Vert says to the cop, “This is for you.” The officer stops in his tracks and sees Arfel do a running vault off a guardrail to a distance of about 15 feet. The officer smiles and says to the four boys, “Be careful!” and walks away.
“We are banned from Battery Park City,” says Pyro. “Park service people just don’t understand what we do.”
“It’s crazy but New York City is very square and built high,” says Pyro. “We hold some jams in Newark by the Rutgers University area—that’s one of our favorite spots because of the low walls and gaps that we can jump. “
The NYPK traceurs have adopted the art as a lifestyle as well. They each push each other to the theoretical edge but never off. They even follow a code of conduct with three simple rules: “Don’t litter, don’t look for problems, and if you can’t jump off don’t get on,” says Pyro.
Parkour has also influenced them in their personal lives. They are all good friends who have the kinship of being part of something special to them. Vert said: “Parkour made such an impact on me that I quit high school because of it. I got hired as a stunt double on a new show called Blue Blood. I had my own trailer and everything.”
“You had a room IN a trailer!” Arfel jokingly interjects.
“It was still a trailer, son!”
In an urban setting, walls aren’t meant to be climbed; guardrails aren’t meant to be vaulted; space is supposed to be static. But the traceurs take urban space and utterly defy it, always going forward, overcoming obstacles and never looking back. Some would say that’s a great metaphor for life. NYPK would probably agree.
Fernando Villar Jr. is a Rutgers-Newark student. Posted September 2008.
