Tag: Parkour
I’ve written a lot about parkour and its relationship to physical comedy, especially here, but also in all these other posts, so I can’t resist sharing the feline version, “Purrkour,”a brilliant piece of filmmaking by Robert Dollwet. (Thanks to Riley Kellogg for the link!)
I like parkour and I’ve already written several posts about it. I like it not only because it’s cool and acrobatic and creative, but because its use of the existing environment and everyday objects has a lot in common with physical comedy. No wonder that many parkour devotees adopt Douglas Fairbanks and Buster Keaton as their patron saints.
Parkour and physical comedy have a lot in common: a similar technical vocabulary, creativity interacting with real-world physical structures, and many of the same heroes — Buster Keaton, Douglas Fairbanks, Georges Hébert. I’ve already written extensively about all that in this earlier post, one of my personal favorites, so today I just want to alert you to this NY Times article:
Parkour and Rube Goldberg both overlap with the athleticism and inventiveness of physical comedy, and I’ve already written about them on this blog, especially here and here. And while parkour freerunners usually tackle found environments, here’s a wild video of parkour being staged on what may be the world’s largest Rube Goldberg machine. It features German freerunner Jason Paul and was sponsored by Red Bull™. Best viewed at full screen!
The notion that physical comedians and other movement artists might have something to teach traditional actors goes back at least a century, when such innovative directors as Jacques Copeau in France and Vsevolod Meyerhold in Russia hired accomplished clowns and variety performers as guest instructors. In the United States, this became a trend in the 60s and 70s as “experimental” theatres sought to break the confines of the fourth wall and Stanislavski method acting to forge more theatrical performance styles.
I’m not in Thailand for physical comedy, but I do keep my eyes open. I like to believe that clowning is universal, as natural as human error, but that doesn’t mean every place you visit is a hotbed of variety theatre, much less of inspired foolishness. Here in Chiang Mai, “cultural capital of northern Thailand,” physical comedy has proven to be an elusive commodity.
No comedy here, but I like biking and this has the most amazing bike stunts I’ve ever seen — parkour on two wheels!
I guess it’s a generational thing, but when I mention parkour to anyone over 40, I usually get a blank stare, which if nothing else makes me feel young and in the know. If you too are going “huh?” just think of those videos you’ve probably seen of ridiculously agile teenage daredevils — Spidermen without the web — jumping on, over and off walls, railings and other structures that get in their way. They are called traceurs presumably because they trace a path through space while leaving only a faint imprint.
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Workshops & Other Events
My first book (1976)
My book Clowns has long been out of print, but you can borrow it for two weeks at a time from the Internet Archive. More information is available here.
My second book (2015)
Visual and verbal humor for the cognitively and artistically curious! Available here.
“A book to treasure!”
—Bill Irwin