The Commons

The Commons reached out for me to snag an interview with Trev (@trevcore_) to go up with his new video part. Out of all the interviews I’ve done so far, this somehow felt both super natural and a bit strange. I’ve been close friends and roommates with Trev for years, and I really wanted to make sure my prior knowledge of him wouldn’t get in the way of properly highlighting his talents as a movement artist. Trev is one of my favorite movers, and a big inspiration for moving in a way that feels authentic and unique. It’s my hope that our chat gives some solid inside into his thought process. 

Egg: If I’m not mistaken, this is your first solo project in four and a half years. In the many years since, how would you describe the changes to your movement and how you arrived at your current taste and style?  

Trev grabbing his feet

Trev: Yeah, its definitely been a while. My movement and the way I think about it has definitely changed a lot since the last time I did something like this. One of the biggest changes is kind of just the way that I conceptualize movement. The way that I see the spot and the way that I think about what I want to do. Starting out, and like throughout my “parkour career” I’ve done a lot of like, seeing something that’s cool and trying my best to replicate it as closely as I possibly can. I think that’s a really good way to learn how to do stuff, and to just figure out what you like and establish a base set of skills. As I’ve done that, and grown and acquired more skills, it’s kind of shifted. Now that I know how to do all of these things, how do I take them and make them more interesting or do them in a new way that I haven’t seen or done before. I think especially recently I’ve been thinking a lot more about the spot, and how the spot can effect or change how a move works or even just how it looks or feels. Taking a spot, taking moves I know how to do, and trying to put them together while thinking about how to use the spot to change the moves I already know, or using the spot to make things that I’ve done before more interesting. Something else I think about a lot is shapes, and how your body can make all kinds of shapes. Certain moves are kind of supposed to have specific shapes, but as you do them over and over again you can alter its shape. I like to think about how changing a trick’s shape can change how I do a specific move. As an example, with like a full, there’s tons of different positions and shapes you can hit while doing a full. Theres so many different ways you can do a full, and lots of ways to think about it. I take a lot of inspiration from skiing, and I think skiing is a really good example of how you can change a shape in many different ways for the same move. That’s why I be grabbing my feet all the time.

Egg: I think there’s like two really good examples in the video of very different takes on doing a full. Like the pistol squat grabbed cork off the ledge, and like the wall-full off the thin slanted ledge. Those are two very different fulls.

One of the mentioned variations of a full

Trev: Yes, they’re very similar at their root, but they look very different and they feel very different. The spot kind of influences that as well as the shape that I’m thinking about. I think more so than trying to progress to harder and harder moves, I think a lot more about taking what I know and adjusting or shifting it to make it different or more challenging or feel a different a way.

Egg: Watching back your last solo edit from ages ago there were a few things I noticed that stuck out to me. There were a number of different tricks or types of movement in it that I don’t really see you do these days. Like there was an ascent in that video, there’s like a flip gap, and there was a descent in there as well. Obviously there’s been a huge time gap, but I was thinking about trick selection and movement taste, and I’m curious about how in these past years you seem to have focused in on a more specific vision of how you want to move. It’s not like the new edit feels boxed in at all, but it’s clear that you’ve found a way of moving that seems to be more specific to you as a mover. You mentioned how in your early training you went about building up a set of skills, and how more recently you’ve focused on tweaking and altering those moves. I’m curious about how you decide on what moves get selected to be adapted and applied, versus movements you maybe lose interest in. 

Trev: I think it’s a really interesting process. I think for me a big part of that selection is about what works good for me in a literal and physical sense. What my body likes doing, and what feels good to do. Also as my taste changes, what I think looks cool and what I find interesting or unique. I tend to find myself wanting to stray away from what is kind of popular or mainstream. Sometimes my thought process kind of feels like “okay here’s the things I see everyone doing, how can I like not do that, or do it in a way that other people aren’t” because that’s like what I want to see from people, and what I enjoy watching. So that’s what I want to do myself, something new or different. It might not be the most revolutionary but it’s new for me. I like to explore what feels fun to me.

Egg: The other main thing I noticed watching your old solo edit, which I hadn’t thought about in a while, is the fact that you have a super strong tricking foundation. That skillset felt much more surface level in application in your old solo edit. Im just curious about if your tricking expertise still feels applicable in your training today?

Trev: That’s a really interesting question. I definitely did a lot tricking back in the day, I was really into it. What I like about tricking these days are the transitions, and the way that moves are connected, and the flow of a tricking line. It can have a lot of different tempos and momentums, and allows for a lot of different types of transitions. I think that carries over to movement today. I still love the feeling of a good tricking transition. I still find myself trying to replicate that at a spot. Obviously tricking is just flat ground, and is extremely limited in its obstacle interaction, but that also can give you a lot of space to be creative and to iterate all the different things you can do in a simple environment. Carrying that over to obstacle interactions can yield a lot. Like I can treat a slant wall like its a floor. I think taking the abundance you can find doing tricks on flat and bringing to more complex spaces can be really fun to play with.

Egg: So these days it’s not so much the tricks themselves, but it’s the compositional tools of tricking.

Trev: Yes, specifically with transitions and obstacle interaction.

Egg: This segways nicely into much next talking point, which is about “style”. I don’t necessarily think that’s the perfect word, but when thinking about your growth as mover, and the development of your taste, I think thats been a cornerstone of your movement. I think there’s almost like a bit of misinformation in the parkour scene about what makes good style, and what working on your style looks like. I think the whole switch-walking thing is like a microcosm issue of that. We are used to this approach of seeing a movement and then trying to replicate it, and clearly style does not work like that. As a connoisseur of “stylish” parkour, can you talk about how you conceptualize the idea of style, and how you maintain a style that is uniquely your own. 

Trev: Yeah, I could agree that style isn’t necessarily the best word for what we’re trying to talk about, mostly just due to most people’s general perception of style. I think a lot people can think about style as looking at what is thought of as cool or popular and then replicating it, with the thought that doing so will give you style. I don’t really think about it that way. If everyone is doing what’s cool and what’s popular then really nobody has style because everyone is doing the same shit. So I think for me style has just become a form of really general expression about who I am as a person, my experiences, my relationships, my emotions and the things I take inspiration from. Style feels like all of that meshing together. Style is everything that is me, all of my experiences and everything that is around me. For me, I used to be very self conscious about the way people perceived me, and I wanted to be perceived in a specific way. I think that true style is natural self expression. Even if its weird, even if its different or even a little kooky, that’s when I feel like people have the most style. When they’re being authentically themselves. When they can take their feelings or experiences and in some way express those. However you want to think about connecting those things, because there are a lot of different ways to think about that and perceive that. It’s different for everybody which is kind what I’m trying to say. Everyone is a different person, and I think that’s really cool. I love taking inspiration from people that I think are cool, and everyone has a different idea of what they think is cool, and so I think its about finding a bit of balance between taking inspiration and then putting yourself into it. Just doing what feels good to you, and doing what you find fun. Thats when I enjoy watching people move the most, when they don’t have that “oh I’m trying to be cool” thing going on, and its more like “this is me and I’m doing these things” you know?

Egg: Definitely. A lot of what you said here feels pretty deeply profound, about bringing your identity to the way that you move. I want to ask if you have advice for people who feel like they haven’t explored that level of self expression in parkour. In some ways it’s so simple, that idea of “being yourself” essentially, but as a blanket statement I think that can be really hard for people to access if they’ve never thought about that before. I’m curious if you have advice for how to get into expressing yourself authentically through your movement?

Trev: Yeah, like a lot of the time that “be yourself” statement is really hard to take and just go out like “ok today I’m going to go be myself”. It’s not really that simple or easy, and that’s something that I think about a lot and can struggle with, but have made a lot of progress with in recent years. I think for me, one of the biggest things that helped was not worrying as much about what other people think or how they might perceive me and what I’m doing. It’s very easy to get stuck in my head, thinking about what I want to do at the spot and being like “well people would think this is cool so maybe I should do this”. Instead I try to take the ideas that come to me, and just play. I think playing is an important part of that development. I think you gotta goof around, you gotta be silly, you gotta look stupid sometimes, and that process of not worrying about what other people will think and doing what might feel good to you is the most important thing. Its definitely a process, you’re never gonna wake up one day and have the perfect idea that’s perfectly you and perfectly expresses who you are. I think even with this video I am not perfectly expressing myself, and my style is not exclusively me, or perfect in any sense. I think its a real ongoing process that doesn’t really ever stop. It’s always evolving, always changing. You got to keep engaging with that process of goofing around, taking some inspiration, goofing around some more, and the more that I do that, the more I feel like I have my own unique style. 

A message to the haters

Egg: I think that’s really solid advice, to not take yourself too seriously. I think that’s pretty key. I really like what you’re saying about it never really being over, its not like you find it and your done.

Trev: There’s no all of a sudden I have my own style, or like I can perfectly express myself through my movement now. The way I think about or perceive things is always changing, and my taste is always changing. It’s an ongoing process that which I think is ultimately an enjoyable one. I like seeing where things take me, and where my brain wants to go.

Egg: Moving back to the video itself a little bit, being your friend and roommate, I’m aware that this video was somewhat born out of an injury. Would you mind talking a bit about what happened, and how it lead to this video?

Trev: Basically I messed up my ankle a little bit while I was trying a roll precision. I think this injury was a mistake of my own, not in the sense of like I messed up what I was trying to do, but I was kind of stuck in my head with this very specific idea of what I wanted out of the session. I think as a result I was being a little bit reckless with how I was attempting what I wanted to do. I kind of just kept pushing it and pushing it until eventually it just didn’t go right. That was definitely a bit of a big deal for me, it was my first substantial injury from doing parkour. The way that it happened made me take a step back and think about what I was doing and why I was doing it. Transitioning to how this video came about, I had hurt myself and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do much for at least a few months and I had a good bit of clips saved, and initially I was like “well I guess I’ll put a video together” since I had the footage I might as well do something with it. As I took a little bit of time away, and thought about what I wanted to do with this project, it kind of transformed into what it is. 

Egg: It feels like in the context of this injury, you’ve put a bit of critical lens toward what your movement and approach to movement generally looked when you got hurt. What do you feel like has changed about the way you want to move and the way you want to train?

Trev: I think the biggest thing that I’ve just kind of realized and been thinking about a lot is my relationship to my body, and how that relates to what I’m doing in the parkour world. For the longest time I was just doing parkour, and having fun, and not really taking my physical well being very seriously. I guess through this I think I’ve realized the importance of taking care of my body, in ways like eating well and doing all of this rehab for my ankle. I’ve been doing yoga, and stuff like that. I’ve been trying to connect to my physical body a little bit more in a way that isn’t just going out and thrashing it doing tricks, and more in a way that’s doing what’s good for me. 

Egg: Obviously injuries suck, and are a mental hardship beyond just a physical hardship, but I know for me the more I got through my injury the more positive change I saw coming about as a result of the experience. It’s really good to hear that this has brought forth positive dynamics to the relationship you have with your body. As you move forward with this newfound perspective, how do you feel like you are going to approach things differently with parkour?

Trev: That’s something I wanted to talk a little bit more about. Like I said, when I got hurt I was not in a very good headspace and I was pretty focused on just trying to get the clip. I was like “I don’t really give a shit if I get hurt, I just want to land this trick”. It’s an interesting balance because I think parkour is a really good way to express emotions in a physical way, just like any sort of art form is, or even like physical exercise is. I’ve been trying to think about how to do that in a more healthy way, instead of getting frustrated and trying harder, letting myself take a step back and think a little bit more about why I’m doing what I’m doing. At the end of the day I’m just out there trying to have fun, and that’s kind of the most important thing. If I’m not having fun anymore what’s the point? I’ve been working on being able to take a step back in that situation and take a break if I need to take one, or even moving on to something else entirely, and just being okay with that. We all have expectations of ourselves, and the things we want to achieve. I think that’s a good thing to have, but I think there’s a line where it’s no longer beneficial. I’m trying to establish a better relationship in that way with my relationship to parkour.

Egg: Touching on the idea of taking a step back and shifting your focus, I wanted to ask a bit about the editing process of this video. While I know that moving and video production often go hand in hand, they are also different art forms. To my knowledge this is your first time editing a project in quite some time. As a group I feel like our knowledge and abilities when it comes to video production have developed a lot over the last few years. I’m curious about what this editing process felt like and what you got out of engaging deeply with editing in the context of not being able to train. 

Trev: It was really interesting, because I had put myself in a situation where I had all this footage. I like all the clips in the video, and I’m proud of them, but there wasn’t necessarily a cohesive intention behind them. They were all just stuff that happened to get filmed while we were out training, without a specific project in mind. I tried to figure out how to do a little bit more than just throw them together over a song. It was a process, and I hadn’t edited anything myself in several years, so at first it was kind of like “okay how do I put a video together, how do I use the software that I’m using”. I wasn’t totally sure what I wanted to do at first. I re-edited the video three or four times probably. Through that process, accompanied by this time off from training, I thought about all this stuff that’s been on my mind and all the things I want to express. For one, I wanted the video to be enjoyable, and good vibes, to kind of represent the time that we had spent filming all of those clips. I also wanted it to represent the change in my perception of parkour and what I am trying to do with it. It got me really excited to continue doing that in the future, and be a lot more intentional with how things are being filmed, and having a more cohesive plan going into a project. I think it gave me a good bit of practice and experience attempting to do that, without the whole process of filming a video from scratch. 

Egg: I think it’s really beautiful how video production as an art form transcends time. This might have started as a loose assortment of clips, but in the context of injury and time off you were able to re-contextualize it and find new meaning. In retrospect, what narrative would you say you’ve imbued into this project? 

Trev: At least what I wanted the video to say, is that I really love doing parkour. For me it was also a way for me to let go a little bit of my perfectionism and my really high expectations of myself. To just take what I have, and remember it. I wanted to show how I have progressed as a person, and how my movement has progressed. Not just in a physical sense, but in how I conceptualize it. I wanted it to document that progress, and to capture the memories of filming those clips and being out with you guys. Something for me to have to look back on. 

Egg: I think it’s cool how this is about documenting progress, because I think that’s core to a lot of parkour videos, but usually just to display physical progress, like “I have leveled up”. Your video feels like its way more about your progress as a person, and the progress of your relationship to movement.

Trev: While I have done some things in this video that I had never done before, as far as skill level goes, that hasn’t been my focus so much as my progress mentally and emotionally. 

Egg: For my last question, that I think might be related to all of this, how did you decide on sprout as the title?

Trev: As I was thinking about all of these things, and where I was at while I was editing this video, as well as looking at where I’ve been these last couple of years, sprout kind of just felt like a good word to say that I’m doing new stuff. I’m getting better, but also I still have a lot more I want to do. I feel like I have a lot more progress to make. In a way this kind of feels like the beginning of a new way to think about my parkour as a whole.