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The Revitalization of Space Freestyle Parkour and Its Audiences Jeanmarie Higgins On the Saturday of the 2008 SETC Theatre Symposium on outdoor performance, conference presenters gathered for lunch at the Forest Theatre on the University of North Carolina campus at Chapel Hill to attend an informal talk from keynote speaker Scott Parker, former director of the Institute of Outdoor Drama. Parker recounted the history of the theatre site, a stone outdoor amphitheatre used to stage dramas in the outdoors since 1916. This talk was one of a set of events that generated discussion about the breadth of material the phrase outdoor performance embraces, from the outdoor historical dramas of Roanoke’s The Lost Colony to American railroad pageants, from the potential theatricality of found outdoor urban spaces such as Deborah Warner’s New York City Angel Project to self-consciously intrusive forms like guerilla theatre and my own work on the dance/sport parkour. A serendipitous collision of two forms of outdoor performance occurred at lunch that day. As we listened to Parker, two young men—dressed head to toe in black—appeared at the top of the audience seating and began to run downhill through the theatre. They bounded past us, down the stepped seating, leaping from level to level, the group of scholars eating lunch just another set of obstacles to navigate. When they reached the bottom of the hill, they ran upstage, exited the theatre, vaulted a picnic bench, and disappeared into the surrounding woods. “Was that parkour?” someone asked. This essay explores the dance/sport freestyle parkour from its beginnings as a group activity—an activity that, according to its practitioners, is “all about community and development”—to its later media construction as a countercultural solo urban practice associated with lawless- 114 J E A N M A R I E H I G G I N S ness, danger, and domination. All types of outdoor performance have one element in common, an audience—an audience that does not exist, as Herbert Blau has illustrated in his many works concerning the limits of performance, “until it is thought.”1 This essay further considers the audiences of parkour, the audience called into spectatorship by the parkour “interruption” at the Forest Theatre, and the audience of consumers served by the representations of parkour generated by various media. This essay will examine how spectatorship—the live spectatorship of the kind we experienced in the Forest Theatre, and the mediated spectatorship generated by photographs and films—shapes the perception of parkour. Parkour began as an activity practiced in suburbs, but as its commercial visibility—and potential for commodification—grew, representations of the sport were set in more “interesting,” urban places. Popular understanding of parkour has been shaped by the media’s desire to connect it to the city and encourages consumers of these representations to view parkour as a critique of the totalizing strategies of these cities. At the same time, the everyday practice of parkour—the Forest Theatre free-run being an instance—while easily seen as a critique of capitalist spaces, can also precipitate this dance/sport into a condition of theatre by shifting a crowd’s attention into a (perhaps unexpected) scopic consumption of the performer’s movement through space. Parkour: An Introduction Frequently called “skateboarding without a skateboard,”2 parkour practitioners , called traceurs,3 partner with rural, suburban, and urban spaces to perform seamless improvised movement built from a set of more or less codified moves. Unlike free-runners, who mine an outdoor site for its potential before moving on, traceurs travel. According to parkour founder David Belle, “Parkour is an art that helps you pass any obstacle to go from point A to point B using only the abilities of the human body.”4 Traceurs scale and climb, duck under and jump over the obstacles they encounter, charting as straight a path as possible, without losing momentum, in the most beautiful way possible. Key to parkour is “flow,” which according to one traceur is “like water flowing down stream and coming up to a boulder. Instead of smashing into it, the water simply moves around it and continues its journey.”5 As meditative as the...

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