SHOW-RUNNERS: The Urban Playground team (from left to right) Alister O’Loughlin, Miranda Henderson, Kurt Jobling, Malik Diouf,  and Sasha Biloshitsky. Photos by Najeer Feroke


Parkour experts shift the focus from what they can do. Today, tomorrow and Saturday evenings, Doha will experience their 2PK show called The Inner City as part of British Festival 2014 in six free public performances at Souq Waqif, writes Anand Holla

Who says you need to be bitten by a radioactive spider to move like a superhero? If you know Parkour, the art of movement that believes in forward motion despite all obstacles, you would be gliding around just like one.

Running, jumping, climbing, rolling, swinging, vaulting, leaping from walls and over gaps, you can navigate through the city with parkour by turning the urban landscape into your personal obstacle course.

Impeccable fitness then must definitely be the top requirement to train in this discipline, right? “Not at all,” says Alister O’Loughlin of the Urban Playground Team (UPG), the UK’s original and premier performance parkour group, “It is attitude.”

O’Loughlin explains, “If you want to move, parkour can help you explore, improve and advance that movement. If you don’t want to, it doesn’t matter how fit you are. Also, if you want to, then it doesn’t matter how unfit you are because you will gain the fitness and strength you need by doing it.”

Developed from military obstacle course training during the late ’80s in France, parkour enables its practitioners (men are called traceurs and women, traceuses) to get from point A to point B by using their bodies and their surroundings to hurl themselves forward.

 “The best training for parkour is parkour,” O’Loughlin continues, “People say I would really like to do parkour but I need to go to the gym and train before I start. We say: Make this your training, and overcome your hurdles. Attitude is what really keeps people moving forward.”

Parkour, also known as free-running, indeed doesn’t offer you the option of stepping back. The only way is to overcome obstacles fluidly, using strength, innovation and speed.

Keeping with the principle of parkour, the UPG, which is the world’s first performance-parkour company, takes the discipline forward, and also all around the world. UPG fuses contemporary and urban dance with pure parkour to toss out the exciting hybrid version known as performance parkour (also called 2PK).

O’Loughlin, who is also the group’s co-director, believes performance parkour is about performing for someone. “Parkour is about training for yourself. You start dealing with all sorts of obstacles physically, which makes you better at dealing with the obstacles in your mind as well. It’s like a personal discipline even if you are training in a group,” he says.

Performance parkour though differs in intention. “We must remember that we have to perform in front of and on behalf of the audience,” O’Loughlin says, about this form that weaves in several elements like street dance, slapstick comedy, physical theatre and capoeira.

 “Sometimes, when people perform parkour in front of an audience, they say: Look what I can do. But with our performances, we always try to say: Look what you could do. We want to inspire people, and tell an interesting story. We want to capture people’s imagination with movement,” he says.

The five UPG performers — O’Loughlin, Miranda Henderson, Sasha Biloshitsky, Kurt Jobling, and Malik Diouf — can certainly do that. As they pose for pictures against a standalone metal staircase, Biloshitsky and Jobling give us a taste of their stunning agility. A left foot here, a right hand there, and a quick pull and heave later, the duo reach to the top of 25 stairs in five seconds.

Today, Friday and Saturday evenings, Doha will experience their 2PK show called The Inner City, as part of British Festival 2014, in six free public performances at Souq Waqif. The spin on “inner city” is a clever one, since in the UK it means the poor underbelly of the city where parkour would most likely be used, and it also stands for the show’s characters — the well-to-do stockbrokers and bankers — who are “in the city” and can’t stand each other.

Diouf, who counts Jackie Chan, Michael Jackson, and even Spiderman, among his inspirations, says, “We bring the story of rebellious inner city office workers to a traditional Qatari setting. It’s only when they stop competing with each other, can they start to move together and achieve something worthwhile.”

O’Loughlin nods along. “So earlier in the show, they fight, block each other, and throw each other off structures, and pull each other back so as to make it to the top,” O’Loughlin says, “But then they take off their ties and start dancing, you know like a street ballet,” he says and smiles.

Speaking of dancing, Biloshitsky, an expert in B-boying, draws ideas from doing 14 years of that.

 “B-boying gave me the idea to express myself with any movement that strikes me. The trick lies in evolving the foundational steps and moving forward. I don’t look at parkour as just getting through the journey, but focus a lot on how to make it look good,” he explains.

In 2005, UPG emerged when O’Loughlin and Miranda, both of who worked in a theatre company, decided to infuse parkour into a dance and drama setup.

Around this time, Diouf, who happens to be one of the nine men who created parkour, was making a documentary film on how parkour had evolved and was looking for instances of unusual parkour spin-offs. Diouf flew down from Paris to film UPG, and became part of the group as well.

 “Immediately, we realised we could make something special,” says O’Loughlin of assembling a motley crew of contemporary dancers and parkour enthusiasts.

 “For us, it is very much the artistic side, the creative and the expressive,” says O’Loughlin, “There’s another side to parkour, which is like a sport, but that’s more like a demonstration if you perform that before the audience.”

Despite being one of parkour’s creators from the age of 14 and having introduced parkour in films such as Taxi II, Diouf is no purist. In fact, he loves the performance aspect as much.

 “We created parkour because back in France, we had no money to go to the gym to train or do backflips,” Diouf says, “We had nothing to do except play a sport. The architecture of our city suited parkour, you know to climb buildings and jump over roofs. We began seeing the city like a playground. The more you train, the playground feels bigger and more familiar.”

For Jobling, Diouf’s films and videos proved inspirational. “They fuelled my interest. Now I practice any discipline that can improve my parkour, like street dance, yoga, acting workshops, etc. Parkour is my base to explore various disciplines,” says Jobling.

With such an abundance of talent bubbling in one unit, O’Loughlin admits it’s difficult to keep the “dream team” going. “We all work as freelancers or do other jobs, but we need complete commitment from whoever joins us. Every time we meet, you must have more to show than what you had the last time, or else there’s no point.”

In the Middle East, the group has been to Kuwait and Oman, and the encouraging word of mouth they enjoyed there is what clinched them the Qatar trip. “This year, we will also perform in France, the birthplace for parkour. So nine years later, we come full circle,” Diouf says.

That’s all fine but how does one practice a rugged, outdoor discipline like parkour in a place like Qatar? “You bring a lot of spare T-shirts along,” O’Loughlin jokes. “The answer is you choose what time you train.”

Apart from staying hydrated, the solution lies in training once the sun sets, he feels. “In UK, when it’s raining for weeks, it seems impossible to train. But we do. So you find your way and adapt to different situations,” O’Loughlin says.  “And that’s because if you say you can’t train because of this or that reason, you have already stopped doing parkour,” O’Loughlin points out, “You see, parkour is about seeing the obstacle, understanding it and understanding how to overcome it.”

 

Catch them live at Al Souq street, Souq Waqif on today (7pm and 8.30pm), and tomorrow and Saturday (5pm and 7pm)

 

 

BELOW:

1) DEFT MOVES: The Urban Playground team in action.

 

2) POSER FOR COMMUNITY: The Urban Playground team pose for Community.

 

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