2010, Parkour is known all over the world ! One of my dreams came true... We can see practitioners every where, people are more and more used to see people "jumping around". The discipline is growing quickly, so quickly, and what I am trying to do is to help passing on this art to the future generations...

In contrary to the time when I met parkour, we now have tons of different techniques, moves and jumps. We have dictionaries and tutorials for every move. We are told where to put our feet in order to do a specific move, in order to clear a specific obstacle.
I can see that sometimes the first things we teach to beginners are basic vaults, or combinations. I feel that we miss something by teaching techniques at the very beginning.

Why?

Because I believe that parkour is an invitation to meet our environment and to have some reflection. When I met it, and what moved me the most, is that parkour was a big and long journey. Our daily goal at the beginning was to discover our environment, having a new way of looking at the space. We had to go from a wall, to a lampost, trough 2 fences and over a staircase, etc... Every time we were facing new obstacles, and we had to use or find some techniques to overcome it.



Today, I feel like most of the time we show parkour techniques, moves and combinations to the beginners who wanted to learn parkour.We are telling them how to pass an obstacle, we show them where to do it. I feel that we are giving all the keys and solutions before that the practitioner even knows the obstacle. Maybe if we hadn't tell them to do a speed vault onto this wall, they would have never seen this wall as an obstacle.

And in the other way, you could ask somebody to reach some place, knowing that he will have to get over a wall, then the person will have to think about how to overcome the wall, and he may find it by himself, without you, or may need your help, but at least he would know he has to learn this or that technique... And the solution will be much more meaningful.

We are not letting them finding themselves face to face with an obstacle, looking for solutions, trying some moves, falling, missing, and then maybe succeed, or asking us for help.

My point here is to remind practitioners and teachers, that parkour is basically a long journey. In this journey we may find difficulties, obstacles that we will have to overcome. You will all have the time to learn parkour techniques anyway, so it's better for you to learn it when you know why and when you will have to use it ...


Thank you for reading,


Johann

Labels: Behind the Scenes, Challenges, Experiences