South East Asia’s first MOVE FEST (www.movefest.asia), a week-long festival which took place recently, had featured some of the fastest-growing movement disciplines in the world such as parkour, tricking, calisthenics, acro-yoga and dance, and was targeted at fostering community, creativity, fun and play, in addition to movement and exercise.

According to the event organisers, SuperFly Monkey Dragons (www.superfly.sg), a progressive parkour movement academy in Singapore, we are supposed to be born to move. 

For example, we begin to learn how to crawl as babies and then we progress to walking on our own two legs, constantly seeing the world with a sense of wonder and amazement in our early years.

But then as we grow older though, we get caught up in the grind of everyday life and we lose that sense of childhood wonder and exploration. Instead we become couch potatoes, rarely taking part in physical activities. With physical inactivity being one of the leading causes for preventable death worldwide and 60 to 85 per cent of the world population being inactive today, this is a cause for concern.

 So the organisers had hoped that with the MOVE FEST, this will instil the sense of wonder and exploration back into people and increase our rate of regular physical activity.

Workshops with Sebastien Foucan

Capping off the festival had been three packed days of workshops with parkour pioneer and FreeRunning founder Sebastien Foucan, who featured in the crane fighting scene in Casino Royale 007 and who was specially flown into Singapore for the event.

Foucan had conducted two different workshops in Singapore, The Games and The Experience.

The Games had been a three hour workshop covering FreeRunning fundamentals for beginners, and event attendees got to experience a different way of movement practice aside from what has become the norm.

And The Experience had been a two-day session of three hours each for more experienced Parkour practitioners, diving deeper into the FreeRunning philosophy and practice.

A training discipline derived from movement that developed from military obstacle course training, parkour practitioners aim to get from one point to another in a complex environment in the fastest and most efficient way possible, using a variety of movements that includes running, climbing, swinging, jumping and rolling.

Participating in The Games workshop

I had been invited to take part in the workshops. And as a beginner with Parkour, I chose to attend The Games workshop.

The Games workshop, which took place at The TripleFit gym at Millennia Walk, was a very interesting and eye-opening experience that had been a lot more fun than I had imagined.

The layout of the ‘battle scene’ had initially resembled a mini CrossFit studio though, as it was littered with items such as gym mats and boxes. But the session had been markedly different to a CrossFit workout.

Foucan’s class had been broken down into three different components – Trekking, Sparring and Expressing.

Trekking

For Trekking, this is basically about moving from Point A to Point B and the essence of the art of parkour. And to begin with, Foucan had us form a long human train, and we had to simply watch and follow him as he moved from one point to another. He took us from the TripleFit gym premises and on a little merry-go-round around the surrounding area at Promenade. 

And on the way, he showed us how to look at our surroundings in a different manner. For example, these had included climbing up and down staircases using the railings, squeezing ourselves through holes in statues and doing somersaults and rolling around on the ground, all parkour movement basics that babies would also typically do when they are exploring their world.

Despite this though, Foucan was also mindful of our safety and none of the movements that he had led us though was too dangerous. Foucan himself may be a master stuntman, but with regards to jumping movements and such, these had usually been from a low enough height – so that we would not injure ourselves or fall when we jumped off anything.

At first though, I had felt that it seemed quite weird to be doing these in such a public location and that people would surely stop and stare, but then again, with a whole group doing the movements, it was actually quite fun and did not feel so bad.

Doing these activities were also rather tiring and exhausting though, as we had to do quite a lot of running in order to keep up with Foucan at times, and I admit that I had felt quite breathless.

As well, he also taught us about the importance of communication during this segment, for example, Foucan would deliver instructions to the ‘head’ of the human train and each person in the human train was then supposed to pass on the message to the person behind them. 

Messages had included instructing us to for examples ‘not step on the lines’ denoting the cracks and individual tiles on the pavement and to ‘not step on the plants.’ But at the beginning, when the message was not passed on, Foucan playfully ‘scolded’ us in jest.

In fact throughout the session, I had thought that Foucan had been very engaging, bringing a playful, child-like attitude towards everything that he had taught, which was rather different to anything that I had experienced previously.

We ended the Trekking section of the workshop by forming our own mini human trains of about three to four people each. Then we would take turns at being the leader of the train, to send instructions and movements down to the people behind us.

While it had been quite fun to come up with my own movements and have everyone simulating all of the crazy things that I had dreamed up of, it was also a bit challenging at the same time, to try and look at everything in a different way too, and to adopt a child-liked perspective to the world as it is something that I have not done in years. 

So this is definitely something that I feel that many of us have lost in the process of our development from babies into adults.

Sparring

The Sparring section for the workshop, as the name suggested, focuses on the primal meaning of movement, that is, to chase and be hunted. So for this segment, we had played different types of ‘tag’ games that had focused on using many of the movements that we had learnt during the Trekking section.

When I was in primary school, I remember that I had used to enjoy playing tag. But somewhere along the way, this had gotten lost and we stopped playing, when my friends and I all grew up. 

So playing tag with Foucan was a great and nostalgic reminder to those days, where I simply ran around, trying to avoid the person that was ‘It.’ And though I had been panting and breathing quite heavily, it was certainly a whole lot of fun at the same time.

This was definitely the meaning of primal movements at its most basic, taking us right back to the animal kingdom where animals run and hide to escape from predators, and chase their prey for food.

Foucan also had several iterations of the classic tag game to spice things up during our workshop, for example, instead of simply chasing each other, there were rules in some of the games, for example, not being allowed to touch the floor or CrossFit-inspired penalties would imply. This meant that we really had to jump and swing around instead of simply running.

Expressing

For the Expressing segment, we did this part in the CrossFit area of the gym, making use of the ropes, ladders, stability balls and the monkey bars on the premises. 

Foucan instructed us to get into groups of three or four people each, and each group would be assigned a certain area of the gym, for example, the stability balls, and we were supposed to come up with our own creative methods of utilising the gym equipment, before switching over to a new set of equipment. For example, climbing on top of the monkey bars instead of swinging on them.

According to Foucan, he had wanted us to look at each “play area” that we were assigned to, in the same way that a child would look at a playground and invent our own rules of what to do with what we had available to us. 

I must confess that there had been times when my group and I were at a loss at what to do with the equipment, because playing in such a manner didn’t really come naturally to us.

Towards the end of the workshop, there was one point in time when I was sitting on the stability ball and bouncing on it, because I could not think of what else to do.

But despite that, the session had still been plenty of fun though. 

Question & Answer and ending the workshop

We ended the workshop with a Question & Answer session with Foucan, where he had fielded a variety of questions that had ranged from his experiences with Casino Royale, to parkour in general as well as his thoughts and comments about parkour in the Singapore and Malaysia region. It had been quite insightful and interesting, to learn more about parkour from the expert.

And last but not least, we then took a group photo, before the workshop had degenerated into a request for selfies together with Foucan, from all of the attendees present.

Overall I would say that I had definitely enjoyed myself at the workshop. It was a very engaging introduction into what parkour was all about, going right back to the basics of the discipline, and I would say that it has definitely whetted my appetite to discover more about not only, parkour but also some of the other movement disciplines too.