Yamakasi became known through French television and a film by director Luc Besson. Eventually Belle starred in the Besson films “Banlieu 13” and “B13 Ultimatum”. Adrenaline became known through their blogs on the early French site Skyrock and through the first dedicated site, le-Parkour.com. In addition to the Team Adrenaline videos that were so popular they crashed, Adrenaline was the first to prepare gifs to share on their blogs. These materials helped to carry and evolve parkour around the world. In 2003, the UK had a website, urbanfreeflow. Soon TV commercials and live events all over the world invited members of both teams to perform fabulous Parkours, elevating the art to a part of popular culture around 2005.

These days many children go after school to Parkour gyms to acquire well-rounded fitness and confidence. All sorts of youtubers do incredible stunts. Parkour is perhaps mostly widely recognized as “Ninja Warrior”, a TV obstacle course competition started in Japan around 1997, later copied in the UK, US, and France.

Daniel‘s film invitations developed into stuntwork, big jumps and falls, and also combat scenes. His first stunt with TangoForge was learning Tango in 30 Days. He then developed a workshop to teach dancers to use the techniques of action film to create videos that really capture the intensity of what we feel that often doesn’t show in videos. This workshop was first presented at our 2022 Annual Seminar Encuentro Compañeros, and then at the Revelation Tango Festival 2023.

For Daniel, Parkour is not just an art of movement. He calls it his “art of life”. When we go through the city, he is always looking for a connection, poles with space to fly around, railings to go under, walls to go up, doorways the right size to do splits across… I am frustrated when he doesn’t give me time to take photos, but he is not producing instagrams. He is just enjoying the city by touching and playing it. He is enjoying his body, by using it all the time. And his life, by seizing every opportunity for creativity.

In one of Daniel’s first videos I found an example of Parkour which is relevant to all of us, regardless of agility. We can find the childhood relation to urban space.