The Commons

Brenda and Steph, the brilliant minds behind the Instagram page @parkourismboard have a refreshing and powerful methodology behind training parkour with a focus on embracing imperfection and enjoying the process. Egg @klickstein sat down to chat with them about their new video project, maximizing joy, and how to train forever.

Egg: Well, before we get into the project, I wanted to start with the roots of y’all’s friendship and training partnership and how that blossomed into your shared Instagram.

Steph: Well, I guess we both have been training at Origins Parkour for many, many years, so we always intersected over time as we just got to know each other better and better, we realized we were pretty compatible in our practice.

Brenda: Yeah, we’re just coming from kind of the same circumstance. Similar age, similar place in life. So we had a lot to talk about, and it’s always easier to talk about the hard things in your life while you’re also training and experiencing something fun and physical together. So, we got quite close through all that.

And then came parkourismboard, and as the piece shows it was initially about injury and coping with disruption in our normal kind of training. But we were already kind of throwing around ideas. Like, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Celeste Barber on Instagram, she’s a middle aged woman from Australia. Her perspective on things is a little bit of comedy, but she takes clips from famous supermodels and then reenacts them in her body and in her own way. And I was always struck by it. Yes, it’s funny, but also she’s beautiful, and her interpretation of it is so valid and reassuring to see. So we also kind of wanted to find a way to express that place for different physicalities and different expressions at the same theme.

Steph: We knew we wanted to collaborate on something, and we sort of attached to the experience that sometimes we would get frustrated with ourselves and sort of be like, “Oh, why can’t I just be so and so, you know, someone we admired.” And then it was sort of like, okay, this is us getting to play around like we are that person.

Steph and Brenda

Egg: That’s beautiful. How many other people around your age have been training at Origins? I feel like within parkour, which is generally dominated by young men— 

Brenda: Oh we hadn’t noticed that.

Steph: *laughs*

Egg: Being a middle aged woman in parkour, how many other people in that demographic are training in Vancouver? 

Brenda: Origins has a super high participation rate in the adult classes. So yeah, there’s other women of our age, there’s other men and thems of our age. It’s always been good like that, and I think it’s so inclusive there that the age doesn’t become like a standout feature. I also kind of loved that through the “Versions” process, we haven’t really touched on our gender or our age, so that was kind of a nice thing to separate. It’s just playing. You want to play. 

Steph: I think I had more bias against myself than the people at the gym did. I didn’t really think I’d be accepted. I I found myself more brought into the community than I expected to. That was really reassuring for me— to find a community that welcomed me even when I thought that they wouldn’t. 

Egg: That’s so lovely. I coached at a gym that only had 3 adults in classes at the time. So it’s really cool to hear that Origins has fostered that community. Not to linger too much on being quote unquote “old” for parkour standards, but I would love to hear about what your guys’ backgrounds are. What were you doing before parkour?  For someone like me who started when I was 11, I kind of can’t imagine what it’s like coming to parkour as an adult.

Steph: So I started parkour at the age of 38 and after having three children. I’d had an interest in parkour, but it just didn’t feel like the right time for me. When I heard that the gym was opening, I got my kids and my husband involved. I had previously done longer distance running, martial arts and dance, so always independent activities. So what was familiar to me wasn’t being on a sports team, but being in a community. I was able to carry over some things from those previous activities, but I don’t really feel like I had a lot of advantages coming into it. And also this is not going to matter for most of your readers not knowing what it’s like, but going through pregnancies and breastfeeding and everything is really depleting, and it was super hard on my body in the beginning, but I got motivated to get really strong so that I could be better at parkour. 

Brenda: My physical background is that I was always just an active kid. My parents put me in lots of different stuff, and I’ve always just looked for things to play. I did spend my young adulthood in snowboarding, working in snowboard shops, that kind of thing. And so I think that experience made parkour somewhat attractive because it has that cultural aspect of community and videos and music and fashion, all of those things.

Egg: One thing I’m still kind of curious about here is whether your praxis around embracing imperfection and just wanting to play came about through parkour, or whether you’ve had similar ethos in other areas of your life prior.

Steph: Well, I think traditionally, I’ve been caught up in perfectionism and trying to prove my value to myself or to other people. I’ve always been really achievement oriented and I like recognition. I had the experience within parkour of really wanting to be good so badly. When I got injured, I kind of had to let go of that. It seemed like every time I tried to set some kind of achievement goal within parkour, I ended up getting hurt. So it really had to teach me to let go of those expectations. Put in the work, put in the play, and enjoy whatever I can get from it. 

Brenda: You say that you are interested in perfection, but something we have in common, is that we are both dabbler in all things. Can I knit? I don’t know. I’ll try. We have persistent hobbies and interests and curiosities. W are both people who are very curious. I think that playfulness maybe comes from that curiosity. And parkourismboard specifically was allowing ourselves to explore that curiosity in parkour because we come from this strong Origins tradition of jump and stick parkour. And as people who train mostly in classes that are structured, you’re definitely taught that foundational parkour, and there’s less of an avenue for exploration. So you know, stumbling upon flipeveryday, it was like, “Wait a second, I don’t have to hit the weight room four times a week to get four more inches on my running jump.” There’s this whole other way I could spend my time to explore my curiosity that’s not so achievement based.

Playtime!

Steph: So I’m super happy with this achievement of having made this video. 

Brenda: Yes! Happy side effects. 

Egg: In the video you touch on how some of the origin of this was Steph’s injury. How do you feel like you arrived at some of this perspective without going through an injury, Brenda?

Brenda: Well, I wanted to hang out with her. But also I felt like I was, you know, kind of hitting my maximal power and fear tolerance. I have a full time job. I have two teenagers. I don’t have the emotional capacity to be always trying to do the hardest thing I can do. So that’s where it’s like, “Okay, today we’re just gonna goof around, we’re gonna flop, we’re gonna flail, we’re gonna giggle until our cheeks hurt.” And that’s, you know, that’s what I want to do today.

Steph: For me, what’s so great about Brenda is I needed someone where I just felt like it was okay if I messed up all the time, like I didn’t have the same need to present a front of being good at everything. I knew that Brenda was willing to just be a goofball and not take herself too seriously, and I needed that.

Egg: I might be a bit biased with this next question, but I’m curious about how this shift in your approach to training has affected your overall enjoyment while doing parkour. For me a less goal oriented approach is kind of crucial for the frequency of joy that I experience through my movement. Are you having more fun these days?

Brenda: I still love a really focused, goal oriented session, but I absolutely need to have the choice. And to choose the joy some days is absolutely required. It’s also maybe brought more joy to me, not just in my own movement, but the way it makes people in the community around me choose to interact with me. It’s out there that I am down to just try it, and it doesn’t have to be cool. It’s gonna be dumb, but like invite me or join in. That’s brought a lot of joy.

Egg: Furthering this a little bit, something I’m interested in is that this parkourismboard copycat approach in, in theory, still goal oriented. There is a specific idea being recreated. So it’s not foregoing goals entirely, but maybe foregoing the stakes of 100% completion of said goal. Just enjoying the pursuit. I’m curious about what this approach looks like when you’re not picking a specific idea to try. How have you carried over some of this playfulness achieved by this pretty specific training approach to other forms of training?

Brenda: I want to say that’s very insightful. I think how it has changed the way we train outside of a specific clip is that, again, coming from a jump and stick background, you show up at a spot and the walls are the right height for you, or they’re the right distance apart for you, and that’s kind of the limit of what you can see at that spot. So maybe it’s just changed dramatically the way we look at obstacles and ideas for interaction with the environment. 

Steph getting funky

Egg: It’s like through all of this time spent kind of training in all of these different styles, taking on the movement persona of somebody for a day, you’ve kind of collected so many styles, that there’s so many different things to pull from when when you are training.

Steph: I think that this project has really opened up what I’m willing to look at and try. I’m less inclined to see a video and think, “Oh, I want to try that.” So it helps me that Brenda is more inclined to want to give things I go. I think I did see myself more as a traditional parkour kind of person. Part of that might be because I was also coaching at Origins, so it’s part of what I did. I’ve grown to be more open to these other styles that I maybe wouldn’t have thought of as being compatible with who I was as a practitioner. So it was nice also to let go of some of those ideas about myself too. 

Brenda: I think it’s kind of those unusual touches. Yes, you can slide on your belly down something. Yes that is allowed. You can just drag a foot along a wall, and that adds some flare. It feels like its given us permission to use those pieces. 

Egg: This is making me think about the final section in the video. I think you phrased it as like, we’re gonna be Steph and Brenda, after all these different iterations of being so and so. I see what you were touching on a minute ago, using your time spent dabbling in various styles to arrive at something that is authentically Brenda and Steph. I would love to hear more about the creation of that line. It was very thoughtfully composed and a standout moment of the film for me.

Steph: We did do a lot of the initial parkourismboard reels based on gym work, and part of that is just our seasonal accessibility to outdoor spaces. So one of the nice things was the opportunity during the better weather to figure out how to translate some of those same moves that we had learned in the gym to outdoor spaces. When I’m doing parkour, I find it a little bit overwhelming, unless I’ve got something that narrows down what I’m going to practice. If you just gave me an open field, I wouldn’t have enough to guide what my practice is going to look like. So it’s either going to be about the space or the style that this person is inspiring for us, or some other thing that provides a constraint. So we did have this whole toolbox of these new skills that we developed, and we had to find a place and a time for the ones we felt we could be most successful at, and how to link them together in a way that’s meaningful. Also because we’re two people, there had to be some kind of interaction or reason for us to be doing this together, and we worked at it. Obviously, there’s a lot of ourselves coming into this. Thank you for acknowledging what I feel like was the process of us bringing ourselves into that final line.

Brenda: Yeah, that does mean so much. Thank you. We have trained at that spot a bunch of times, and that slant wall is just so fun. Also aesthetically for filming, it works really well. As soon as we knew that we had the potential for an overhead angle, we really started thinking about how to play with the layers there. So when Steph was like, “What if I go under the bench while you’re on the bench, I was just like, “Ahhhhhhh!” 

It was really fun trying to put that together because we came from different directions and had to use slightly different applications of skills. And I have to say that my favorite parts of the whole final project are some of the very quick clips where you see the people that were there with us that day. That was the most heartwarming day of my entire parkour experience. We had René there and Josh there, and Gloria there and Daryl there, and everyone was just there to make our dreams come true. I will remember that day for my whole life. It was beautiful. Thank you to all those people!

Egg: I’m really impressed that it was just one day there.

Brenda: Steph and I went a day before to work it out. And then when everyone else showed up, we we’re like, “Okay, so here’s what’s happening. Let’s go.” 

Steph: We have our process behind how our weekly reels are put together. We show up, we do our warm up, and then we look through clips and decide, what are we going to do that day? We have max hour and a half. So it might take a half an hour. We might get to an hour and a half and still not be satisfied, but we got what we got. And this time around, we wanted to be sure that we were gonna be able to pull this off without taking up too much of everybody’s time. I was so grateful for all the people involved in this project. I felt so well backed on something that I think meant a lot more to me than anybody involved knew. 

Egg: I’m still kind of baffled that it was only two sessions to put all that together. I’ve done a little bit of partner movement, and it’s really really difficult to contend with the pacing between two bodies. And what you arrived at was quite complex. Major props for just two days.

Brenda: Well we had done all the skills before! 

Steph: We have years of experience working together, and I drew in the old dance choreography skill set. We did have to count out our steps.

Brenda: Which René very loudly left in.

Steph: *Laughs*

Egg: You said you had done each piece of the final composition previously, but what about the final move, the part where you guys are literally interacting with each other? Was that something you done previously? 

Steph: So we’ve done a variation of that. And so that day we did have to have Josh spot us, because we hadn’t done that exact thing before, just a similar version.

Brenda: It was so much pressure not to drop Steph on her beautiful head. I’m so glad that it worked.

Steph: Do we expose our secret, Brenda?

Brenda: What’s our secret? 

Steph: Soda pop.

Brenda: Oh that’s just parkour standing operating procedure. We just made the wall sticky with some pop, some mountain dew. 

Egg: Very standard operating procedure for sure. Do you guys have like a favorite section in the video of all of the typical parkourismboard style sections?

Brenda: The moment where Steph completely forgets how to do a somersault kills me every time. She knows how to do that.

Egg: Sometimes you take a skill, and if you change the apparatus, all the info goes out the window.

Brenda: I love it so much.

Egg: One moment in the film I found particularly interesting was when you’re recreating Tam’s line. And that one is incredibly space specific in the original clip, and the spot that you ended up going to is similar, but different enough that you needed to adapt some of the specifics. I find it really engaging how the the feeling of the line remained the same even though a lot of the intricacies of the movements were different. Maybe that speaks to part of this process as a whole, taking the idea in spirit and not verbatim. How do you approach maintaining the energy of an idea, as opposed to the raw form?

Steph: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I really like that aspect of the practice, figuring out how to adapt to what we have available.

Brenda: It may even be helpful to not have the precise structure, because then you’re not doing a strictly side by side comparison. It’s a little more leeway to adjust, infer, and translate, which maybe lets us put more of ourselves in it too while keeping the spirit.

Steph: Those are my favorite sessions. Generally.

Egg: Do you guys ever like reach out to some of the people you’re recreating to ask for advice?

Steph: Really it’s the exploration, the figuring out how to get it done. That’s a lot of where the fun comes in.

Brenda: I think I’ve asked after the fact how do you avoid bruises that last six weeks after a session like this, and they’re like, “No, you just get the bruises.” But I’ve never thought of asking for advice ahead that would be interesting. 

The other thing that’s actually super interesting is that we don’t usually watch back any of it while we’re in the moment, so sometimes its just in the edit later where I’m like, “I just misinterpreted that action entirely” and now that I’ve had another look at it I’m sure if I tried it again, I’d have a better insight about how it actually works. 

Egg: That’s really interesting. I’ve not met many people who work like that. I feel like reviewing attempts during the session is how many people teach themselves new concepts in parkour. Do you think that allows you to be more present with each other and look to one another for feedback? 

Steph: I think that’s just another way of how the process is more important than the outcome. We basically have one camera set up stationary to capture everything that’s going. We just let it run until we’re done. And then we take terms with the edits. I also love how every second week I get the surprise of seeing which parts Brenda decided to pull out, and how she puts them together and what music she picks. It’s like I get a little gift every two weeks.

Don't forget to smile

Egg: My last questions is about longevity in parkour. I feel like this play-based embracing of imperfection seems like the way forward. That’s what I think will keep me training until I’m very very old. Any tips on how to train forever?

Steph: Well, I’m almost at 10 years, but a large number of those years ive been at sub-max capacity, and I’m there again. I always find it’s hard for me to find balance between pushing too hard and still maintaining what I think of as progress. So this is another way to progress that is nursing to every part of me.

Brenda For me, its just about being sure that what I’m pursuing is still something I’m curious and excited about. I think the body changes. I feel like I’ve already lived in four or five different bodies in my lifetime, and that’s gonna happen over and over until it just stops working. So right now, parkour is the medium, but there are hundreds of ways to express your motion and your curiosity through your body, and I’m just going to keep following the one that makes me curious and giggle and get to spend time with my friends. I think that’s the path to doing it forever.