Reclaiming our bodies and the urban environment

A manifesto of sorts for the freedom of bodily expression

This is a somewhat unusual post. It contains an impassioned email correspondence with a dear friend, dated some time in December 2011. I was 27 when I wrote it. As with many fruits of one's youth, I find that it reads a bit naïve. But its general gist still very much resonates with me. It was written around the time M and I discovered parkour – but it would be another 6 months before we  would both experience the thrill and empowerment of the movement art. Although I can no longer count myself as an aspiring traceur (a practitioner of parkour), I retain a genuine admiration for people who live and breath the form or indeed any 'grassroots' expression of the body, e.g. breakdancers. 

The so-called urban movements of breakdancing, parkour, tricking, free-running are archetypal examples of the outward intelligence that imbues each and everyone of our bodies. These activities emerged in a po-faced society (i.e. the Western world) that quite drastically severed being from body, at least from the time Descartes proclaimed 'I think therefore I am'. The body is seen in this society as an automaton, its principal raison d'etre being to transport the head, which carries the brain, around. If one is to get ahead in life in this society, the qualities associated with the body, such as emotions, are to be reined in by the rational mind. Thus self-expression and exploration of outward bodily intelligence through movement – in the way of the breakdancer or contemporary dancer or traceur – remain at best a fringe activity practised by good-for-nothing loafers. Additionally, we are conditioned to ignore the body's inward intelligence – exactly its emotions, sensations and messages because these are seen as being beyond reason and therefore not conducive to furthering the aims of the economy. Society's belief in the primacy of reason and its presumed source, the mind, which is treated as quite separate from the body, has conditioned us to give very little thought to the way we carry our bodies – until some form of pain or illness beckons.

When we do get moving, many of us take up fitness activities that treat the body as an automaton, an object that needs tending to in a mechanical way. Hence the plethora of classes at the gym with names like 'Arms and Abs'. 

Whenever you run, cycle or swim, you set your body on an automatic journey of repetitive motion. Once you attain a comfortable level of speed and oxygen intake, your mind disengages further from the body, carried away from the present moment and down the frenetic stream of your consciousness. Your body goes on autopilot, its task being essentially mindless, a no brainer. 

Crucially, through the constant repetitive motion of these activities, you reinforce movement patterns down to the cellular level of your body, whether or not those movement patterns are beneficial to your being's overall wellness. I often observe runners with poor alignment and technique, which means that they are having to use more muscular force than is necessary if they paid attention to allowing their bones and joints to move freely and therefore function properly as a weight-carrying framework. 

Please understand that I have nothing against running or cycling per se. I think these are wonderful activities that have their place in keeping us healthy and happy but only when they're engaged with mindfully (and certainly not in a gym). My point here is that these activities do not generally ask us to be intelligent with our bodies. A part from improving aerobic fitness, strength and speed, they do not test the body's agility, co-ordination, balance and ability to improvise. By focussing on the measurable aspects of fitness (aerobic metabolism, strength and speed), these activities – and gym activities in general – treat the body exactly like a machine, and an entity that's separate from who we are. 

So back now to parkour.... Without further ado, here is the email that I wrote to my friend circa Dec 2011.

***

Dear C,

I've just returned from a very enlightening and personal trip to Paris! I have been dying to write to you for the last couple of days because of something that happened to me while I was there. An epiphany of sorts! Paris is fascinating not only for its vast and rich history but for its not inconsiderable contribution to 20th century urban culture. This is apparent in the facade of the city: its resplendent beauty is interrupted and stitched through with a forbidding postwar brutality. M and I visited La Defense, the business district that was designed over the last 50 years, and all we could see were the endless possibilities for the traceur bent on reclaiming the urban sphere, not to mention anyone else interested in realising their full citizenship in an iconoclastic way. Our experience was amplified by our discovery of an issue of Stradda, a Parisian magazine, in a quaint dusty bookshop in Montmatre that featured traceurs, breakdance crews and street circus freaks.

As Steve Pavlina rightly reminds us "Humans are not meant to be raised in cages, you poor thing". M & I are more and more convinced that human beings are not built for sedentary living. The nature of children is always instructive. Without computer games and the internet, you can barely get them to sit still.

Modern life has made our minds very clever but also made us very dumb about our bodies. The upshot is that we don't need to become cyborgs before becoming less than human.

The rigidities and conventions of modern life have alienated most of us from our bodies. When we were children we were wholly, unconsciously in touch with our instinct to move and to explore the miracle of our bodies. Have you ever seen a child fascinated by his or her own feet? 

Then we grow up and somehow it becomes embarrassing for us to spontaneously break out in dance on the streets or do stretches while queueing for the toilets at a shopping mall. If anyone of us harbours an urge to dance (and sing) in public, the urges are quickly snuffed out by self-censorship. These activities are seen as spectacle that have their place on stage or in the movies. Despite everyone's ability to dance and be creative with their bodies, society has cordoned off bodily expression from the masses behind professions (e.g. the dance profession) and purpose-built spaces (e.g. nightclubs, even gyms). (I am reminded of a  girl, possibly aged 10 or 11 years old, who was behind me in a queue for the toilets at Gare du Nord in Paris. To kill time, she was marking out what looked like a street dance sequence. Her mother or guardian gestured that she should dampen it down despite the fact that she was being far from disruptive. Parents always know best.)

Does it seem absurd to you that in order for us to move our bodies expressively we have to allocate time to do it, and that most of us do it in expensive cages e.g. gyms and nightclubs? 

We have access to streets, offices, corridors, train stations, parks in which there are no laws preventing us from moving in any which way we want but we are socialised to use most of these vast spaces for simply getting from A to B. Our cities, after all, were built to mobilise the masses as efficiently as possible for the sake of the economy! 

Unlike children who freely climb here, swing there, bend, twist, shake whenever they please, most of us have neutered our physical vocabulary to movements that enable us to uphold the very system that has encouraged this impoverished vocabulary. The saddest example of this is, of course, the daily car and train commuter. 

There is no poetry in our movements, only functionality. We've come to believe that the poetry of movement, or dance, is something you have to go to a special school to learn; that not every body can be a canvas for free exploration. Many of the moves that I learn in my street dance classes initially feel 'unnatural', but I see nothing inherently unnatural about them.

Coming back to Paris. Maartens and I were very lucky to chance upon a vast exhibition at the Centre Pompidou on the history of contemporary dance. Seeing footage, photography, models, artworks of this art form, in which the aesthetic and athletic perfection of classical ballet is subverted in the development of more conceptual forms of dance that are truer to the human spirit, touched me in the most unexpected way. While the intellectual aspects of contemporary dance may not be accessible to all, the forms of bodily expression it contains are. (We should all be able to roll around on the floor, jerking this way and that, like a serpent, without embarrassment, if we so wish!) This realisation that such bodily expression is practised by so few, in so few places, and under so few circumstances really upset me. While we place so much emphasis on the right to freedom of speech in the public realm, why aren't there more people defending the right to freedom of bodily expression?

Our dumbness or blindness to our bodies comes down to our lack of body awareness. I'm not talking about the issues we have with our weight and diet and so on. The fact is, most of us have little consciousness of our habitual patterns of movement as well as of the movement aptitudes of our bodies. I realised this as I studied the movements of this particularly elegant woman at a cafe in Paris. As she took off her coat and mounted a stool, she did so in such a graceful manner I could almost see a series of dance moves materialising. But I wagered that she had no idea how she looked as she moved nor how she could consciously express herself with her natural elegance. 

So, where to from here? As a first step to bringing the body back into the fold of every living moment, and to shake up our sedentary modern lifestyles, M and I recently started doing simple physical exercises at our respective workplaces. There is nothing new about this. But unless you work for progressive companies like Google where rollerblading around the work campus is de rigueur, most of us, as members of standard corporate cultures, are likely to attract looks of incomprehension if not downright discomfort from colleagues whenever they catch one of us doing a set of push-ups by the desk. Both of us can vouch for this! (As an aside, both M and I have wondered why it is that only certain corporate executives get to enjoy the privilege of a personal putting green in their offices.) The good news is, despite the wall of resistance, I have had one first-hand account, from a colleague, that having the urge to move isn't unique to me! "I just want to get up and run around," she said while remaining plastered to her seat. 

What M and I are doing is not radical at all. If anything, we're introducing something natural - our urge to move - into an unnatural way of life.

When I've been very bored, I have fantasised about breakdancing and doing acrobatics in the middle of the office, parkouring over office partitions and on desks. In fact, at the dance exhibition I mentioned, M & I were very impressed by the filmographic work of the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. It was a video (set to music but not a music video) of a creative work place on a working day. Everything looks normal until certain 'employees' do freeze-frame hip hop moves mimicking the nature of the work at that work space in the middle of real employees going about their work. 

Workplaces aside, M & I have also started to use the vast amounts of space we have as residents of a city for purposes other than to get from point A to B. For instance, while waiting for friends at the entrance of a Metro station in Paris, the two of us did some stretching to the inevitable bemusement of passersby (and a dog). We've also practised dances we both learned while waiting for a train. 

At 27, I think I might have found my calling. I want a hand in changing the prevailing system to one that encourages all of us to use our bodies more expressively every day. It's very idealistic, and I have scarcely formed a plan of how I'm going to do it.

As Nietzsche said: "Every day I count wasted in which there has been no dancing". So together with traceurs who are reclaiming the surfaces of their cities, I want every person to reclaim and celebrate the miracle of his/her body.
That's everybody.