REVIEW: 'Trace Elements, Get a Grip' - L'Art Du Déplacement

By Cecilia Mitchell Trace Elements, Get a Grip - L'Art Du Déplacement Discovering a new art form is like discovering a secret. One's heart beats a little faster. It’s exciting. More exciting than learning there is such a thing as jasmine-flavoured ice cream, or finding on a map a country you’ve never heard of. In a new art form lies the possibility of creation. Get a Grip – L’Art Du Déplacement brings the French art of Parkour from the streets to the stage in an impressive display of urban acrobatics and raw physical energy. With roots in French military training, Parkour is the discipline of moving quickly and efficiently through situations of necessity and overcoming obstacles of man made and natural landscapes. Trace Elements explore the aesthetic, instinctual and philosophical elements of Parkour in a fusion of live performance, film and music. Get a Grip transforms North Melbourne Town Hall's Arts House into an urban streetscape. The stage is a large scaffolding structure with wide vertical walls mimicking the sides of buildings and large industrial blocks. The crowd sits on shallow tiered benches as if in an inner-city skate park. Emerging like ninjas from the darkness, five figures arch and stretch their bodies, moving across the angles of the scaffolding. Swinging and climbing like spider monkeys, the figures become clearer in the smoky orange light. Five young men dressed in modest black street-wear leap from the high scaffolding to the hard floor. Rolling upon impact allows inertia to direct them safely into the next movement but the rawness of the action causes the crowd to murmur anxiously. One by one the performers leap over large white blocks again and again each time adding an aerial twist or flip. As the tricks become more dangerous the crowd begin to clap, encouraging the performers to flex their acrobatic abilities by moving the blocks further apart. The music, produced live by sound artist Byron Scullin, skilfully incorporates the impact reverberations created by the movements on stage, creating a soundscape that is responsive to the visual performance. The physical performance breaks twice while films are shown on a large screen suspended above the scaffolding. Part-documentary, part-spectacle, the film gives context to Parkour both as a physical discipline and a philosophy. Traceurs (practitioners of Parkour) describe training the mind to trust the body’s ability to overcome the obstacles of the physical environment. Spectacular footage of Parkour being practiced in familiar locations allows the audience to contextualise it in the environment to which it was designed to respond. Traceurs leap and cling onto buildings at Melbourne University and scamper over the Southgate Footbridge at Southbank. But the film also detracts from the performance. The footage is at times repetitive and self-indulgent and rings of the YouTube stunt videos popular with teenage Googlers. In a show of only forty five minutes, the combination of mediums could be refined to a more seamless integration, but overall the effect is achieved. The difference between ‘Get a Grip’ and other performances that bring street art to the stage, such as martial arts theatre and circus, is that Trace Elements present Parkour in such a startlingly unpretentious way. The performance is fascinating and refreshingly new.