#themovementcreative

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Governors Island Parkour Playground 2015

Parkour Making the World A Playground for Teens

Walk by the multi-colored jungle gym over at Tompkins Square Park, and you’ll often see kids jumping over rails and swinging across monkey bars in seemingly ordinary fashion. Watch for a few seconds longer though, and you might notice some of these youngsters making swift moves with calculated precision, leaping with focus and landing with grace.

Swooping through the air and curling their way through the narrow gaps between bars, what you’re likely watching is parkour, the holistic training discipline growing increasingly popular among teenagers in New York City.

Jennie Miller and Diana St. John are mothers to 14-year-old lifelong pals, Jake and Eli. Sitting on a bench nearby, the women glance over at their boys attempting feats that look more like Tarzan’s brand of acrobatics.

“As a mother, as soon as your child can crawl, you get nervous,” said St. John. “But when I see them building strength and control, then I’m less nervous and I can go get a cup of coffee.”

Her son, Eli, admits he was nervous when they first got into parkour, but practicing 10 hours a week has helped replace those fears with fun.

“We see everything differently,” he says. “If I see a wall, normally I’d just think it’s a wall, but now I look to climb over it.”

Miller says since the boys started training with Jesse Danger, lead instructor and co-founder of city-based parkour group, The Movement Creative, they’ve witnessed a maturation of body and mind in the kids. 

“The path of our children’s lives has been changed by the last year of learning parkour. Their whole beings have changed,” says Miller. “Physically they’ve changed so much, but also they’re so confident.”

Miller’s son Jake in particular has experienced a complete physical transformation, going from a round, chubbykid to a lean, agile athlete in less than nine months. It’s that level of radical turnaround that’s needed for the more than 17 percent of teens coping with obesity in New York, according to the national health institute Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s also the kind of change members of The Movement Creative think they can influence.

“It needs to be play, you need to enjoy it,” says Caitlin Pontrella, one of the group’s co-founders. “You need to be social, as humans are inherently social. And as far as success? There’s no winning or losing. Parkour celebrates effort more than achievement.”

In theory, planning moves in parkour boils down to moment-to-moment decision-making. Practitioners, known as traceurs, begin by charting paths mentally, and then execute by attempting to follow those paths with their bodies. Navigating through life with that mindset, Danger, the calm and collected sensei of sorts to students all across New York, keeps his eyes fixated on the path between the present, and the future he’s about to meet.

 “With adults, you kind of have to reinstill a passion for play,” says Danger, 25, who trains members as old as 57, and as young as three. “But kids, they love doing this.”

Danger has known this since he first came across parkour at age 16, watching grainy videos of amateur kids in France pulling off crazy stunts in urban neighborhoods. An avid skateboarder at the time, he decided to ditch the wheels and started getting around the way he believes “we were built to move.” Almost a decade later, he’s trying to relay that same philosophy to public schools across the city, and he’s already had some success.

In December 2010, Quest To Learn, a middle school in Chelsea, was put in touch with Danger about the prospect of providing alternate forms of physical activity for students. 

“The reality is not everyone’s gonna like to play on the basketball team or the volleyball team,” says Cameron Brown, health and wellness instructor at Quest to Learn. “Any alternative activities we give the students that get them out and get them moving can only be positives for the students and the school as a whole.” 

One of six schools housed in its building, Quest To Learn was strapped with limited gymnasium space and time, forcing the physical education department to get creative. Volunteering his services to get more young minds outside the doors and into parkour, Danger was brought in to lead 15 students through a week-long demo workshop. As interest among the student body quickly began to build, a relationship with the school developed and soon after, Danger was leading a weekly after-school parkour program for kids on Wednesdays. Now approaching the three-year mark at Quest, enrolment for the current school trimester is at 85. Brown projects by the end of June, that number will have tripled, and he expects those numbers will result in deflating waistlines for overweight students.

“I constantly have students say, ‘Well, we’ve got parkour today, so I’ve gotta fuel up and make sure I get a good lunch,’” Brown recounts. “Jesse and his team have made an immeasurable impact on these kids.”