Moving from point A to point B will never be the same.
A page I like to look at from time to time is called, interesting thing of the day. Recently it had an article on parkour, which I found extremely interesting. What is parkour? And why do I find it so intriguing? ...
If you check out the wikipedia article on Parkour, it says:
(Le) Parkour (sometimes abbreviated to PK) or l'art du déplacement[1] (English: the art of displacement) is a physical art of French origin, the aim of which is to move from point A to point B as efficiently and quickly as possible, using principally the abilities of the human body.
That sounds neat. As I have mentioned before I am drawn to things of french origin. I am also an artist and appreciate it in many forms. As a wrestler and former personal trainer the bit about using the abilities of the human body was a bonus. Given that hat trick I had to check it out for myself.
Being the true netizen that I am I promptly made my way to the google video search ( which I have "v" set up in my address bar to do the search in Opera ) and put in Parkour. There are many great videos there that show it as an art and/or philosophical practice as well as videos showing how bad ass people think they are. Then of course there are David Belle videos. Being one of the creators of the parkour movement he obviously has some great practice. He does a good job of showing off both sides of the art.
Here is a great documentary showing off some of the movements in a small space that people use to train:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkHPQPozDRs]
Here is a clip of David Belle in action from the french movie District 13:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01du2W6VJis]
If you are interested in finding out more and you live in the US, a good place to start is American Parkour dot com. On another note, if my sister or any other Madonna fans are reading this - parkour was featured in Madonna's "Jump" video.