Re-presenting young people

Performance Parkour or 2PK is reasonably new in the UK, as everywhere. We’re incredibly lucky to be working with a form as it is developing and emerging, and even more fortunate that our work involves travelling and teaching. In March we went to Kuwait with the British Council, presenting our show The Inner City, a slapstick choreography for family audiences which features a group of office workers climbing the career ladder and sliding on the slippery slopes of success. Alongside the show we delivered a series of workshops for young people through the host organisation LOYAC, an NGO working towards youth development across a whole range of activities under the direction of its incredible founder Fareah Al Saqqaf and her daughter Nadia.

In Kuwait, it can be difficult for young people to pursue activities such as parkour or breakdancing. Despite their enthusiasm, there is a lack of teaching provision and those who look to practice on the street are quickly moved on. LOYAC provides a space in which creative activities are facilitated and supported in much the same way we’d expect in the UK. There is the view that street-based disciplines can provide a means of engaging young people who would otherwise be excluded from the mainstream, and since so much of our work is about engaging difficult to reach young people there was an immediate ‘fit’ with Fareah and her team, who are really unique in Kuwait.

"street-based disciplines can provide a means of engaging young people who would otherwise be excluded from the mainstream"

Our set is a construction of scaffold and decking that had been beautifully replicated at LOYAC and, given the warm weather, we took advantage of the large courtyard to deliver workshops outdoors. Our participant group numbered around 25 students, ranging in age from 10 to 24 and from diverse backgrounds. Some were familiar ‘young loyacers’ but others were drawn by the whisper of ‘parkour’ and the chance to get involved in something very different.

We had around 14 hours over four days in which to work. The physical exertion of what we do soon adds up and, for those who are unfamiliar with moving through fluid transitions of height, in which the whole body is active in exchanging and transferring weight, a three-and-half hour session is really long enough. For us, it's always a challenge to cover all the fundamentals, build up a shared vocabulary of movement and allow the participants plenty of time to play and have fun whilst developing their own choreographies in a short timespan.!

"it's always a challenge to cover all the fundamentals, build up a shared vocabulary of movement and allow the participants plenty of time to play"

Fortunately there is enough space on the set, and with some careful time management the participants created distinct pieces of work showcasing their individual skills – from body builders to break dancers and from total beginners to proper divas, all had a star moment in a great ensemble piece set to DJ Shadow’s 'Organ Donor' and brought together by our artistic director Miranda Henderson.

Our show played three times an evening over the weekend and the young LOYAC PARKOUR team really stepped up to represent their own performance before every one of our shows. We’re very conscious that the most valuable role we can play as ‘outsiders’ is to bring a local audience to view their own young people differently. This is as true in the context of helping a school teacher re-vision their class during a workshop back in Brighton, as it is against the grander backdrop of Kuwait’s Marina Crescent re-presenting young people as performers and creative artists to the general public.

"the most valuable role we can play as ‘outsiders’ is to bring a local audience to view their own young people differently"

Across the Middle East there is an issue with engaging young people in healthy physical activity. The extreme heat that pervades for much of the year combined with extremely cheap fuel prices promotes a social life lived in air-conditioned malls accessed by highways. When young people are attracted to unorthodox movement practices – street dance, parkour, freestyle gymnastics – they first have to overcome negative connotations around anti-social behaviour. 

Performance parkour relocates these movement languages in the same space inhabited by contemporary dance, and its practitioners as dance artists. The audience’s reaction was unequivocal – loud applause and expressions of delight. There is now a tentative 2PK community in Kuwait, inheriting our set as a base to work on and with the ongoing support of LOYAC and the British Council: this makes for a very strong legacy. We look forward to watching their progression, and helping in every way we can through our 2PK Network.

Credits

Alister O'Loughlin is the lead coach of Prodigal's Urban Playground team, and visited Kuwait with the support of the British Council. For more information about Urban Playground, visit its website or Facebook page. Follow @UKTheatreDance for all of the latest news, opportunities and blogs from the British Council Theatre and Dance team.