Every Saturday, starting at 11:00 a.m., a small group of Corvallis residents finds surfaces to crawl or climb on, objects to leap from or glide over, using architecture on the OSU campus or in public parks to guide and propel their movements. They are participating in non-traditional parkour classes, taught outdoors without the medium of a gymnasium, and with the intention of preparing participants for direct action and community care.
Locations vary weekly, but the values are always the same: beginners welcome, coaching available; support one another in growth and practice; take responsibility for your safety; land softly, move gracefully; orient towards collective liberation.
What Does Liberation Parkour Look Like?
These classes, which are free and open to anyone, are led by local resident Albert Kong, who describes parkour as “an urban movement discipline that challenges how we interact with the architecture of a city” with an inherent “philosophy of transgressive exploration.”
Kong, who grew up in Corvallis, spent two years teaching parkour — also outdoors, free, and open to the public — in the San Francisco Bay Area following his graduation from the University of California at Berkeley in 2010. It wasn’t until the Occupy Wall Street movement, which Kong participated in through the Oakland march, that he started coming to a deeper understanding of parkour as an inherently political practice — one that, like occupations, actively challenges the control, privatization, and policing of space.
“By the time Occupy came around, I was deep in parkour, and learning about politics and culture through that little lens,” said Kong. “I had been more angry with corporate power by then, more aware of inequalities and injustice, but confused as to my role and not yet awake to the power of prefigurative direct action that Occupy embodied.”
Years had passed before he started practicing again, and all the while, Kong became more involved in art communities, participatory theater, and grassroots organizing, which helped direct his attention to more local contexts before moving back to Corvallis in 2017.
“We spend so much time on national politics,” he said, “and forget about the people in our own backyard with whom we can actually build solidarity and affinity with.”
Through joining these other spaces and practices — and continuing to build local solidarity as an active member of the Mid-Valley IWW and steward of Mt. Caz — Kong learned the language of direct action, collective care, and the philosophies of relationship and transformation. The idea for assembling a parkour community in Corvallis, then, was to translate these into building whatever liberation parkour might look like.
“This time around, I am a bit older, a bit slower, and building another community of practice from scratch in a small college town,” wrote Kong in a submission to the Once is Never Parkour Zine. “But I know why I’m practicing and teaching parkour again. I’m developing a movement where all of these metaphors and lessons can coalesce.”
Flexibility of Thinking
One of the movements that Kong has drawn from to inform his practice is Theater of the Oppressed, which invites audience members to become actors rather than spectators in performances that shed light on oppressive norms and systems that are present in common, everyday life. Local zinester and artist Christina Tran writes that the goal of Theater of the Oppressed “is for people to be able to practice and rehearse revolutionary actions that they can use in real life.”
In the context of parkour, while some might interpret this as relying on learned moves to more easily evade physical conflict, Kong encourages people to embrace the more creative and transformative implications of the practice.
“A term I’ve been exploring lately from Theater of the Oppressed is ‘demachinization,’ which refers to the removal of normed functions of things and exploring their other possible functions,” said Kong. “In practicing parkour, we transform a space — however you use it, transforms it.”
As a longtime designer of live action role-playing games or LARPing, Kong’s work has incorporated these concepts by focusing on challenging players to view and participate in the physical spaces around them as stages that invite play and the creation of new, meaningful experiences.
“I think that my practices of parkour, live games, experience design, and interpreting social systems all have an inherent… kind of practice of recycling pieces of the environment around us that have already been created for other purposes, introducing rules that allow them to be more than what they are supposed to be,” wrote Kong in an old newsletter. “Making and playing games that use public space is a reminder that we can appropriate, co-opt, and repurpose environments to represent values of play instead of whatever e.g. a concrete wall represents — deterrence, exclusivity, control.”
In this sense, he believes that parkour can help those who practice it cultivate a more radical imagination — starting with repurposing property as partners rather than obstacles in their movements.
“We need to be able to see that the world can function differently — even with the same elements, the same people, the same structures,” said Kong. “Parkour gives us tools to imagine how structures designed to stop us, slow us down, or direct our movement can be reimagined, and become irrelevant to the point where we get to choose how we want to use them. And cultivating that imagination — that flexibility of thinking — creates space for us to differently imagine our neighbors, our cities, our work, our beliefs, our sense of safety, and on and on.”
Embodied Liberation
According to Kong, there are several other ways to consider how values behind the physical movements of parkour can be applied to organizing and participating in social movements. For one, parkour communities tend to encourage slow, progressive growth and mutual support over competitive one-upmanship. At the individual level, practicing parkour allows people to acquaint themselves with their bodies as sites of autonomy and joy in relationship to their environments, while also learning more about their own capacities — as well as their limits.
“Parkour as a practice of embodied liberation strengthens our capacity as individuals to assess and take risks, and care for our needs and safety so we can determine honestly how much we can engage in movement work, and then do it,” said Kong. “This is in opposition to charity or self-sacrifice, which can lead to paralysis or burnout.”
Additionally, Kong said that parkour’s emphasis on challenging how people interact with spaces — regardless of their prescriptive functions and/or imposed restrictions on how they’re supposed to be used — can bring people in solidarity with those who are directly affected by space-mediated injustices that drive displacement as well as the disruption of relationships between people and places, from gentrification to pipelines.
“Civil disobedience is speaking to this constantly; nonviolent direct action [says] we have to break these rules that are an affront to our sense of justice. But how do we get to the point where we’re willing to?” said Kong. “One of them, I think, is a beloved community that fights together and in which you know you have support; another one is a real sense of purpose and a vision for the future; but I think another one is also this muscle that we need to develop.”
This is a muscle of challenging oppressive norms — one that is exercised in part by participating in collective practices that prefigure life without these norms, and show that another way of living and relating to one another is possible.
Forming Community Power
“[Through parkour], we build trust with each other, we build a sense of responsibility and learning and community with each other, and that makes us stronger as a group when we have this kind of embodied relationship with each other.” said Kong. “I equate it more to squatters’ movements and community gardening projects, and all these examples where people live under societal expectations about how they’re supposed to be with each other, and they say, ‘Well, those expectations aren’t adequate, they don’t satisfy me, so I’m going to get together with people that I trust — and bring in other people as well — to create something better.’ Now we can take what we know about each other and support each other in opposing sweeps, in creating cooperative economies, in taking direct action, and in building the world that we want to live in in many other ways.”
As a means of bringing more people together, Kong has been leading beginner parkour classes in tandem with the local Really Really Free Market at the end of each month. In October, for the first time since the RRFM’s initial appearance, free hot meals were prepared by a few members of the sweepminers and provided at Pioneer Park, close to an area where many unhoused people have been living.
“For horizontal, autonomous community power to form, it will not happen because we have lots of superheroic individuals coming together, but because each of us is bolstered and sustained by community connections,” said Kong. “This is true about how we participate in movement through [embodied] relationships, and just in the fact that if we create a parkour community that explicitly orients towards liberation, that community can organize as a bloc towards mutual aid, community defense, and direct action.”
For updates and more discussion of liberation parkour, subscribe to Kong’s listserv.
By Emilie Ratcliff
Do you have a story for The Advocate? Email editor@corvallisadvocate.com