Parkour, a gravity-defying hybrid of martial arts, gymnastics and dance, is surging in popularity. Davin O'Dwyer meets some of its Irish devotees.
Outside Dublin City Council's offices on Wood Quay you can often see a bunch of teenagers - perhaps a dozen - loitering around its steps and ramps. They resemble a group of skateboarders whose boards have been confiscated but who have decided to hang around anyway. If you give them a second glance, though, you might catch them vaulting over a railing, jumping against a wall or leaping across the steps. Each member of the group repeats the jump, the same technique carefully honed. Loitering has never looked so strenuous or so skilful.
The teenagers are practising parkour, a new sport, sometimes called free running, that is often described as a hybrid of dance, martial arts and gymnastics. It has its origins in the industrial suburbs of Paris, where two friends, David Belle and Sébastien Foucan, started using their surroundings, including rooftops, as an obstacle course. They have gradually developed it into a discipline with its own ideology. At its heart is "the art of movement": practitioners, or traceurs, must negotiate their environment smoothly and fluidly, with an emphasis on aesthetics and elegance. Jumps, leaps and runs have to flow into one another.
The most experienced traceurs, such as Belle and Foucan, negotiate the rooftops spectacularly, scaling high walls in a few deft moves and leaping from building to building without breaking stride. It looks like something from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or The Matrix, with a dash of Spider-Man thrown in.
Even in the less dizzying surroundings of Dublin's civic offices, some of the jumps appear to redefine what the body is capable of. These young people aren't just vaulting a rail; they're practising a sort of physical art form.
Seventeen-year-old Andrew Corrigan is one of the organisers of these parkour jams, news of which spreads through a website, Parkour-ireland.com. He started parkour last summer.
"There's quite a few of us active. A crowd of us went up to Belfast last November for a big jam on the waterfront. There's a bigger scene there than here, but it's growing. We do it every weekend, and I practise during the week as well," he says. "We practise in groups called clans. We're the Urban Ghosts parkour clan, and there are other clans in Galway, in Kerry and Kilkenny, lots up north. Then we have nicknames - I'm called Crimson - that we use on the website."
Two Channel 4 documentaries, Jump London and Jump Britain, featuring Foucan, Jerome Ben Aoues and the Urban Freeflow clan practising parkour at landmarks across England, Wales and Scotland, helped to popularise the sport, inspiring many young people to take it up. One is Shane Walsh, or Fathead, as the 15-year-old is known on the website. "One of the first things you have to learn is how to fall properly. You have to be able to take it, take the bumps," he says. "It's about spreading the shock out, through the palms, and rolling through the fall. But it's easy enough to pick up the basics. Within a few weeks of starting you can be doing nice jumps."
Those jumps include a huge variety of obstacle vaults, with spins or flips as flourishes. One of the most spectacular vaults involves a smooth, both-feet-first motion that requires bravery. Another move is the precision jump, which involves leaping from a standing start onto a narrow bar or wall, landing and remaining completely still - the balance required is extraordinary. Some wall flips are straight out of the break-dancing school: running up a wall is followed by an overhead flip. The cat leap, a trademark parkour move, involves jumping against a wall and holding on to the top, with little more than your fingertips, before hoisting yourself up, all in one graceful movement.
The infinite variety offered by the moves has resulted in a split in the movement. Belle insists that parkour is about fluid, efficient movement through the environment. Superfluous flips and spins - acrobatic tricks, basically - run counter to that aesthetic. So if you throw in an extra spin coming out of a vault, for the heck of it, you're diluting the parkour ideology, he believes.
For many traceurs, however, those flips and spins add to the fun. Their approach has led to freestyle parkour, which has less rigid notions of what constitutes fluid movement.
"We try to keep out of that debate," says Corrigan. "We just keep practising and having fun, and don't see the need to take any positions on that." "There are parkour competitions in England," adds Walsh, "and some people are opposed to them, too. It's gotten into a huge argument."
Even so, the sport is growing at a phenomenal pace. Clans are springing up across Europe and the US - and the trend of posting films of jams online means this is probably the best-recorded birth of any sport. Type "parkour" into www.youtube.com and you'll get hundreds of movies. Although many are amateurishly shot films of beginners, some rival Jump Britain for breathtaking rooftop leaps and jumps.
Inevitably, the showcasing of extreme parkour has earned the sport some unfavourable press, and there are risks when traceurs over-reach themselves. "Mostly, parkour is done at ground level. It's the really good guys who go higher," says 17-year-old Conor Hurley. "You know yourself when you're able to go higher, and it's vital to know your limits. And because we do it in groups, there's a kind of protection there. We all know what we're capable of, and we wouldn't allow anything too risky." "Also, the fear is good," says Corrigan. "It's about overcoming the fear. When you get past it, you do tend to get those jumps. But you've got to be aware of your ability and work within that."
The benefits outweigh the risks, they believe. "It definitely makes you more health-conscious. You have to take care of yourself," Hurley says. "Your legs and back and shoulders build up. It's very good for you, really."
What about access? "It can be hard to get places to do it, without getting kicked out," says Walsh. "Dún Laoghaire art college has a parkour club, so we can practise there, and UCD is a good place for it at the weekends."
"We definitely try not to be confrontational with security guards," adds Corrigan. "We just try to explain what we're doing, and they sometimes accept that. Because we're not likely to do any damage, like a skateboard can, they are a bit easier on us. Even here [ at the city council buildings] we've had people who work here come up and say: 'Nice to see you do your stuff.' "
One of the most rewarding aspects of parkour is the sense of community. "There's a real mixture of backgrounds among us. Many of us wouldn't know each other if we weren't doing it," says Corrigan. "And with the clans all over the country, it's a really good way to meet people from everywhere." For Walsh, it's all about maximum commitment. "You have to be able to commit to things. You can't bale out of a jump at the last minute. With parkour you have to literally throw yourself into it."
Sébastien Foucan's website is www.parkour.com.