Navigating the urban jungle

• Source: Global Times
• [11:44 August 04 2010]
• Comments

Shawn Xi and Martin Chen executes a backflip in tandem.

By Jonathan DeHart

As commuters emerge from the subway at exit 19 at People's Square, they stumble into a primal display of urban athleticism. A group of agile men are climbing, flipping and jumping from the walls and sculptures dotting the area just outside. As the spectacle unfolds, a crowd gathers to get a taste of the extreme sport known as freerunning. "Everyone stops to watch," Kyle Shapiro, a 23-year-old Canadian who practices the sport in Shanghai, told the Global Times.

In recent years, the fast yet artistic movements of freerunning have spread through popular culture via video sharing websites, action movies like Casino Royale and video games like Assassin's Creed. Yet, these gravity defying moves have evolved from a deep, down-to-earth philosophy and physical discipline known as parkour that teaches students to overcome obstacles by adapting to the environment through safe, efficient movement.

"Parkour is fundamentally about getting from point A to point B in the quickest, safest way possible," said Shapiro, who has five years of parkour experience. Yet, despite parkour's sound fundamentals, many brand it as dangerous. This reputation has forged a hazy relationship between its practitioners, or tracers as they are known, and authorities, who sometimes prevent them from practicing in public due to liability issues.

Regardless of the risks, Shanghai's parkour community has grown steadily over the past three years. During this time, local tracers have not only combed the city for the best spots to play, but have also set up a center and competed nationally. Shanghai's tracers insist that there is more to parkour than meets the eye.

Shanghai hits the ground running

Parkour's Shanghai run began in 2005 with Qiu Dongkun, who now works as a photographer. But according to Shapiro, the seeds Qiu planted in 2005 did not begin to fully blossom until 2007. Shanghai's parkour community now boasts a steady base of tracers, Shapiro estimates that the community includes a strong 15-member inner core and 40 marginally serious members. "At first, we were just a group of amateurs who couldn't even find a venue to train at," Yuan Guang, co-partner of the Shanghai based parkour center Hyper Freedom or Huta as it is known in puntonghua, told the Global Times.

Shapiro, a Toronto native who originally came to China as a university exchange student in 2008, was the first foreigner to join the ranks of Shanghai's scene, which he said is still predomi-nantly Chinese men in their 20s and 30s. "There's the odd foreigner here and there, but I've been the only consistent one," he said. And while he attests to a recent influx of curious foreigners, on the whole, "Expats don't tend to pick it up in China for some reason. But the situation is slowly changing." As for female members, Shanghai based parkour enthusiast and photographer Shawn Xi said that some have shown up from time to time.

Both Shapiro and Xi agree that interest has spiked in recent months. In response to this growing interest, the community established the Shanghai Parkour Center, officially registered under the name Hyper Freedom, in April 2010. This small gym in Pudong gives parkour junkies a place where they can pay a drop-in fee for daily practice or attend courses with seasoned pros.

While the center is a start, it has its drawbacks. "China's access to good equipment is very limited," Shapiro said. "But Hyper Freedom makes do with only walls, railings, bars and mats to train on. A gym gives us a legitimacy that simply playing in the street does not."

Ultimately, this gym is only a simulation of the open city, parkour's real ter-rain. Peng Jian, a 24-year-old tracer who currently heads Hyper Freedom, told the Global Times. "The urban landscape is better in Beijing than in Shanghai because there are more bungalows and old structures that are suitable for climbing. In Shanghai, high rises are everywhere." Regardless of these limitations, tracers in Shanghai have made the most of what they have.

More than a sport

The most serious tracers elevate parkour to the status of a martial art. "The sport is all about perseverance under fear and stress," Peng said. "You need to have what it takes to be a fighter in this sport. You need to overcome a lot of real obstacles as well as mental ones."

Alongside this mental focus, parkour also makes a case for reconnecting with one's inner primate. It teaches students to connect and interact with the world directly, instead of avoiding contact with it. This notion has been coined "human reclamation." "Before there were sidewalks and roads, people moved around naturally," Shapiro said. "When we lived in jungles, people would jump from trees if they had to. Nowadays, you see lines in front of escalators, even though there are stairs right beside them." Taking it a step further, Sahpiro added, "When you start doing parkour, you come to a stairwell, for example, and you think, why not climb?"

While relearning some of the most basic of human movements may not seem to mesh with the acrobatic moves in a freerunning video on Baidu, they are two sides of the same coin. In Shanghai, parkour tracers are schooled in both the fundamentals of parkour and the flashy moves of freerunning. On Wednesday nights, the gym holds intense training sessions that cover the gamut of techniques and strength training. "But on Saturdays, we meet in People's Square or somewhere else public to have fun," Shapiro said.

This fun, which routinely draws an enthralled crowd, is a public demonstration of freerunning prowess. Although it is not parkour per se, freerunning has created a stir in the media and on the Internet. This frenzy, tracers say, has led the public to associate parkour with leaping from rooftops and flipping off of high platforms; a misconception that serious tracers are quick to correct.

"Freerunning is something that's been created by the media," Shapiro said. "Parkour is efficient. Doing a back flip is not. But ultimately, freerunning and parkour go hand in hand. Whether it's freerunning or parkour, the important thing is how you train your movements."

In Shanghai, where media buzz has lagged, this effect is less felt, according to Qiu. "There is little said about this sport in local media," he said. "Shanghai is a business-oriented city. A sport that does not produce anything in a business man-ner fails to get noticed."