BODYPK HISTORY

Research / Facts: physical comedy

1920’s, 1930’s away before parkour generation the video links show that sport…* dance and contemporary dance have been using and working with obstacles for a very long time. From today’s perspective, Buster Keaton would definitely be (or IS)  the first parkour expert 🙂 of all time and Gene Kelly would be the 2nd for sure on the movie screen. Jackie Chan one of the inspiration for parkour generation and Hollywood.

First parkour film on screen was Luc Besson’s Yamakasi.

*parallel to the development of parkour Akos was working/experimenting with very similar movements (he named this body-stunt-skating)

*Akos started as a break dancer in early ’80s. Since then he has been interested in all kinds of urban art forms, including parkour.

*Now, Akos is experimenting to connect all the information he gathered over the past 25 years and now calls this endeavor bodyparkour®.

*1998: Video / Akos & Mimi’s (body)parkour moves before parkour 🙂

Company Two in One was working – dancing with objects as obstacles in 1998 in their project ‘Le Matin du ‘n Faune’. The movement was very physical, with jumps and contact dance movement forms (you can even find – using today’s term – parkour movements in the choreography). Then, in  2001, Cie. Two in One became interested in urban youth culture & street art. They started researching a crossover with contemporary dance. The first station was at Mains d’Œuvres Paris, where they were researching the ‘mistakes’ on the halfpipe that the extreme sports experts were doing and more how to dissolve the fall. They discovered a new way of moving – including jumps, slides, rolling on the halfpipe and called it ‘body-stunt-skating’. During this experiment, someone pointed out that “it looks like parkour, what is in the movie Yamakasi”!

Their full-length evening production ‘Free Fall’ was premiered 2003 in a public skate park on a halfpipe in cooperation with Tanzquartier Wien and SzeneBunteWähne Festival at SkateLab Vienna. The performance included professional dancers, extreme sports experts, and break dancers. Afterward, Cie. Two in One toured with ‘Free Fall’ in Poland, Wales/GB, Austria and Hungary.