Persistence and Parkour Spirit.

We finished the South Bank "Sisyphe" project sucsessfully on Saturday night but the reverberations of 16mins of constant vertical motion are still with me. Julie Nioche asked us to think "Why do you jump?". It's a pertinent question and not dissimiliar to the question "why do you practise Parkour?" proposed by Laurent at Rendevous II.

There are many thoughts on this (e.g try Parkour Generations for a huge worldwide response to this on the forum). From the simple but entirely complete "I just love it!!" to many more existential (guilty!)musings on Parkour as metaphor for ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING in life, to ask the question is to also to reflect on what you percieve, value, fear and aspire to most strongly. I love that whenever I have asked people that I train with this question they know an answer instantly.

In particular the themes of insistence, persistence and resilience from the project, inherent in staying on one spot (ooops mostly... sorry Jacob!;.() and not being still no matter how nervous, bored or exhausted you become have really stayed with me. It echoes the sentiments of Stephane in the Parkour documentary...always this voice inside me saying again , or the phrase "etre et durer" or "to be and to last". To some the project was only a Parkour project in as much as the group of performers shared an interest in Parkour but in other ways I feel the project was very much about the spirit of Parkour, which in some ways is more important than the activity itself. In other ways the spirit and the ideal is nothing unless rooted in action. ......and so i remind myself to stop writing and go and do something......!!!!.

Update

Tried out the 'Rail of Infinity' this weekend. Unfortunately it has a few gates and huge gaps where the rail has been removed meaning it is not an uninterrupted loop. However it is still uberlong and has some a few nice loose panels for maximum wobble interest. It took about 45mins to walk round the whole thing and apart from enforced stops where i took the opportunity to adjust my warped vision in which I swear i can see portholes to other dimensions, I only came down once. More visits will be paid.

The 45 mins I spent on the rail were heavenly and this reminded my that of all the things I could potentially value, freedom is my no. 1 choice. Juliet and Gabriel reminded us during the project of the story of Atlas who spends eternity carrying a huge rock up a hillside, lets it roll down the hill again at the top only to be fetched and carried back up again. It was suggested that rather than being in a hellish state Atlas' freedom from choice and decision made his situation blissful. It's an idea I had mused on during conditioning drills where sometimes by questionning whether you can or will do what is asked of you makes the activity much more tiring than just handing your body over to the instructor and getting on with it!. I certainly felt that, once the decision was made to get up on the rail and put one foot in front of the other until I had come full circle I had been temporarily liberated from the noise in my head. Recording these mental wanderings also fulfills a similar purpose of liberation and for that I am v. grateful.