Combining parkour and contemporary dance

How contemporary dance and parkour come together to create a whole new movement vocabulary

June 11, 2018 04:35 pm | Updated June 12, 2018 01:50 pm IST

The ceiling-high shelves of books at the Madras Literary Society, on Saturday, had a group of visitors that were a little different from its usual patrons. This group dressed in black and white didn’t just sit and demurely flip through pages of the paperbacks. Instead, they put together numerous metals pipes and formed a stage of sorts.

They then blithely jumped over and under the poles, at times resembling Batman gliding through the skies, and then swirled and spiralled around it with the grace of a swan.

The audience, seated on blue plastic chairs, looked agog as members of Chennai-based Parkour Circle along with Kolkata-based dancer, Satakshi Nandy put together a play titled Still Rivers .

It’s been a busy weekend for Nandy and the team from Parkour Circle. On Sunday, at a different venue, they organised a movement workshop on Parkour and Dance Perspectives.

“Parkour borrows elements from other principles, be it gymnastics or martial arts, and then it gets distilled into what we know as Parkour,” says Prabu Mani who started Parkour Circle three years ago along with Baskaran Subramani, Varsha Venugopal, Susheel Samuel Chandradhas, Kavita Krupanidhi and Kishore Muthumani. Mani says that his organisation works with dancers. “In parkour we have a set number of vaults which keep growing bigger as you advance. You push for distance and height and that way there’s not much development in that. But when you work with dance you enrich your vocabulary. You get surprised as you try and incorporate those movements,” he says.

There’s a symbiotic relationship between the various art forms, he says. “The workshop is about understanding principles of contemporary dance and parkour in an interdisciplinary fashion. We also want to see where they connect and where they detach,” says Nandy who first tried parkour in 2016. Meanwhile, the participants at the workshop gingerly trod on the grid, following the instructor’s directions. They crawled on the narrow metal bar, balanced themselves as they walked and manoeuvred through the elaborate set up that resembled a jungle gym. “The main objective of the four-hour workshop is fluidity in movement and understanding a different kind of movement language,” explains Nandy. The workshop also aims to dispel preconceived notions that people have about limited movements in parkour. “For example, contemporary dance uses a lot of spirals. You can use this in parkour too,” says Nandy as a few of the participants spiralled to make their way through a challenging point on the grid. But for the instructors, it’s not the complex moves that seemed like a task. “What’s challenging is to be as detailed as possible when creating the module so we can simplify and in a clear manner teach the participants,” says Nandy.

(For details, log onto Parkour Circle’s Facebook page.)

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