Archive for August 16th, 2009
Barclaycard World Freerun Championships
I’d challenge anyone not to enjoy today’s freerun championships in Trafalgar Square. I popped in for the qualifying rounds, and then caught the rest on BBC 3.
If anything, the biggest problem it faced was that the standard of athleticism was so high that the athletes made it all look much easier than it was. After half an hour of watching, I was perfectly ready to believe that anyone could flip backwards off of a sheer wall, flip in the air and land perfectly on the ground eight metres below. I’m quite used to seeing freerunning moves executed in video games like Assassin’s Creed or Infamous, but thinking through what makes it possible for a human body to do the same is quite a realisation.
Aside from the physical prowess of the freerunners, the event was fascinating as a display of urban culture. In cultural contexts, the word ‘urban’ has taken on a slightly overemphatic meaning, with its implications of inner city communities and suggestions of decay. But from the point of view of the development of creativity and of specific art forms, the development of the concept of the city is a fascinating topic.
My academic background is in Classical (say, 5th Century BC to 5th Century AD, throughout the Mediterranean) literature and history. Within this, the development of the city is of crucial importance. The city states of Greece, such as Athens, Corinth, Sparta etc, saw the development of tragic and comic drama, of history in its fullest narrative sense, of philosophy, and so on. Perhaps more importantly, the conflict of viewpoints between the urban and the rural is a feature which persists in its fullest form through to the literature of arguably the first modern city, Imperial Rome; often in Latin texts, it is simply urbs – city.
What I saw today was certainly an artform. The movement of a body from A to B is as prosaic as the technical description of the light of the sun being affected by the curvature of the earth: and if poetry or photography can transform the latter into a perfect sunset, the former is just as altered by the tenets of free and aesthetic movement behind freerunning.
Cities have two fascinating attributes: human density, and persistence. They collect people, provide spaces for people, and contain structures (such as residential districts, transport infrastructures, shopping malls etc) which define and encourage interaction. They are also persistent, which means that the fabric of the city, imprinted though it is with the personalities of those who have passed through it, exist independently, to the extent that a city can be buried for a thousand years, then dug up and interrogated about its inhabitants.
What does this have to do with freerunning? The answer is that freerunning is an artform which communicates incredibly poetically this balance between the human and the structural. People build cities, but quickly they become fundamentally unknowable to their inhabitants. If you live in a city, you will have felt this without question. Walking through a city on one’s own during the evening, perhaps with no specific destination, we are faced with a philosophically fascinating but practically irrelevant distinction between the city and an old and comfortable friendship.
Today reinforced for me that freerunning works the same way as good photography, with the city as its subject. It takes the familiar and the specific and makes them unusual, generic, and beautiful.
