The Movie about Parkour Comes to Plaza Theater

MY PLAYGROUND
Saturday, 1 October
7:30pm
Plaza Theater
1049 Ponce De Leon Avenue NE
Atlanta, GA 30306

Tickets online or at the door are $8.00 US
Click here to purchase MY PLAYGROUND tickets online.

Trailer for MY PLAYGROUND

Q&A with MY PLAYGROUND Film maker Kaspar Astrup Schröder and BIG’S Founder Bjarke Ingels

Parkour is a sport in which you have to go from one point of the city to another as efficiently and quickly as possible, overcoming any obstacles in your way: walls, fences, trees, etc. This has made Parkour THE urban sport, included in recent music videos, advertisements and feature films.

Danish film maker Kaspar Astrup Schröder ‘s new film MY PLAYGROUND, is a documentary on movement, tricking, freerunning and parkour, and its relation with the urban spaces. The documentary features scenes with parkour masters Team Jiyo and interviews with urban planners, local politicians, architects and philosophers.


Bjarke Ingels, image courtesy MY PLAYGROUND

We had a chance to talk with Kaspar from Copenhagen, along with Bjarke Ingels award winning architect and founder of Bjarke Ingels Group –BIG - who is featured in the documentary. In a conversation about Parkour, about architecture and how, when brought together through film, are inspiring a movement around the world.

OC: How big is Parkour and how did it begin?

Kaspar: It started in France in the 1990’s and has evolved to the whole world, I’ve seen videos from India to Africa to New Zealand, people are doing it everywhere. It is really growing, especially in Denmark; it is the fastest growing sport among young people.


Team Jiyo, image courtesy MY PLAYGROUND

Team Jiyo who are in the film are the lead team in Denmark and they are competing on an international level. They have channels on YOU TUBE where they are doing stuff no one else can. You Tube is Parkour’s club, that is how they get to know each other. They meet up at gatherings all around the world to train with each other. The British Parkour guys are at the top of their game in the world right now so everyone wants to train with them and go to England. Denmark is now the Parkour capital of Scandinavia because of Team Jiyo. I’ve even met people in China and Japan who knew about them, and so the sport is really growing.

OC: MY PLAYGROUND is really two films. It isn’t only a film about Parkour but also a film about architecture and urban space. Architecture and extreme sport aren’t normally looked at in this way.

Kaspar: When I began doing these test shoots with the Parkour teams I started composing my pictures according to the buildings and the space but with these guys moving within the space it became a totally different experience. This was something eye opening to me and it made the space much more alive and dynamic. There is a suburban neighborhood of garden homes flowing over a 10-storey building called THE MOUNTAIN which BIG designed in Orestad city just outside of Copenhagen. I filmed the top Parkour team in Denmark, Team Jiyo jumping from roof to roof and did a short film. That is why Bjarke came on board. I gave him the film and he was like, ‘This is amazing, we have never seen our buildings in that perspective, I want to be more a part of what you are doing’ We began the discussion about preserving space, exploiting space and how you show architecture in a film. So it was a journey for everyone to make a film not only on Parkour but also on architecture that didn’t feel like a traditional architecture film. So for some people it is an architectural film, some people see it as a Parkour film I feel it is a good mix of both.



Bjarke: When Kaspar took that few hours of footage and put it together as this small teaser it instantly became a classic and I started using it in all my lectures. The primary resonance the film has made is to communicate on such a physical intuitive level just by watching the two guys climb up through the MOUNTAIN and jump back down again in a real physical space. It is way beyond what we have been able to capture, it helps transmit our ideas and experience of our work in a way that we couldn’t have done without this visual information. We started a dialog with Kaspar about trying to engage with the architecture at all stages of realization. In the office, looking at the architectural models, going to the construction site and moving around the building in the making and afterwards inhabiting the buildings as they are completed. Even if you are only interested in Parkour it will give you more of an understanding that it isn’t just a specific art form but it is really an ongoing attempt to accommodate public life as a whole.

In a way Parkour guys running around becomes some kind of an exploration of space that, by having them in the foreground and the building in the background you focus on the life that is lived in the building but you experience the space that wraps around it.

Kaspar: The film was originally going to be 20 minutes. I did want to shoot the guys in all this architecture and travel with them to different locations but I didn’t really know how it would evolve. Once Bjarke and I met and began to collaborate this was pretty much curated by him. Being able to go to Shanghai with Team Jiyo where Bjarke was building the Expo Pavilion that you see in the film was a real gift.

Bjarke: One thing that is quite special with Kaspar’s approach that really works for me, unlike some documentary makers where it can’t get hand held enough even though Kaspar is like a one man army on My Playground, he has a really graphic eye for creating scenes in a way that are interesting compositions.

The second half of our Q&A with Kaspar Astrup Schröder and Bjarke Ingels can be read in the 2011 Design Is Human Publication.



MY PLAYGROUND
Saturday, 1 October
7:30pm
Plaza Theater
1049 Ponce De Leon Avenue NE
Atlanta, GA 30306

Admission $8 cash/ $9 credit card. To reserve tickets early, email