Parkour

Parkour — the art of moving through the city with maximum speed and economy — arrived in the public imagination as a kind of kinetic sublime: a human body negotiating the modernist geometry of steps, balustrades and façades with a grace and style that repurposes urban architecture. If, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the niche cinema of Jump London and Jump Britain gave freerunning a documentary halo, the UK collective Storror has, in the last decade and a half, translated that aura into a deliberate practice of image-making, brand formation and theatrical risk. Founded in 2010 by a core from Horsham and quickly consolidating into a seven-strong team — Max and Benj Cave, Drew Taylor, Toby Segar, the Powell brothers and Josh Burnett Blake — Storror self-fashioned as both performance troupe and media studio. 

To read Storror from an art-historical angle is to see them as heirs to several modern legacies at once: the Situationist dérive and psychogeography (the practice of drifting through the city to reveal hidden affects), Gordon Matta-Clark’s “anarchitecture” and his radical cuts into urban fabric, and Yves Klein’s performance gestures that turn the body into a metonym for a conceptual project (think Klein’s Leap into the Void). Where Matta-Clark physically excised and reconfigured space to reveal the contingency of architecture, Storror performs the inverse — re-inhabiting and re-narrativising already-constructed sites by putting the mobile body at their visible centre. Their rooftop runs, cliff plunges and dam races are not merely athletic feats: they operate as site-specific propositions that re-distribute the sensory register of place, insisting that urban surfaces be read as scores for choreographic intervention. (One might also invoke Walter Benjamin’s flâneur — now, however, mechanised with GoPros and drones — who does not simply stroll but negotiates spectacle.) 

The collective’s visual grammar is worth close attention. Storror’s films choreograph scale by alternating intimate POV shots with drone panoramas — a dialectic of immersion and overview that produces a peculiar epistemology of the city. These juxtapositions recall the modernist cinema’s oscillation between the subjective and the omniscient, but with a digital twist: the drone’s gaze is not the godlike eye of Eisenstein but a sympathetic camera that valorises skill as knowledge. Their longform documentary projects — including SuperTramps: Thailand and Roof Culture Asia — and their work on commercial film projects have extended parkour into a narrative field of documentary, travelogue and branded spectacle. 

There is a paradox at the heart of Storror’s practice that makes them a singular subject for contemporary aesthetics. On one hand, they celebrate the tactile, improvisatory intelligence of the body: training, repetition, and a kind of vernacular virtuosity that resists institutional capture. On the other, they are consummate producers of image economies: YouTube channels with millions of subscribers, monetised documentaries, collaborations with mainstream cinema. The Situationists warned against the colonising tendencies of spectacle; Storror embodies both the critique and its absorption. Their performances critique cities by revealing alternative uses of built form, but those revelations are themselves re-packaged and monetised within global attention markets. The result is an ambivalent art: emancipatory in gesture, commercial in circulation.

This ambivalence has ethical and political dimensions. Parkour’s iconography — islands of bravado on private rooftops, leaps over voids — can flirt with irresponsibility; controversies have followed, and Storror have had to navigate the consequences of highly visible stunts that brush up against public and protected spaces. The group has, at times, apologised for episodes that landed them in the crosshairs of public opinion, a reminder that the aesthetics of transgression are also regulated by legal and ecological frameworks. 

Seen through the prism of contemporary art theory, Storror’s work also forces a rethinking of the body as medium. Where performance art of the 1970s used endurance to contest institutional norms, Storror uses risk as a communicative strategy in an attention economy: the body signals authenticity because authenticity still registers as capital. Yet there is something stubbornly democratic in their visuality. Their videos are manifestos and travelogues: they invite adaptation and community-building across global parkour networks. In that sense they are less Duchampian readymade than pedagogical practice — a living curriculum for an aspirant urban movement.

Finally, there is an aesthetic pleasure that cannot be reduced to branding: the ecstatic choreography of a group moving as one across thresholds; the paradoxical stillness of the pause before a jump; the suspension of doubt mid-air. These are moments of what Jacques Rancière might call a re-distribution of the sensible, where what is visible (and socially legible) is remade by the skillful transposition of bodies and built environment. Storror’s films make us look twice at banal infrastructures — dam walls, alleyways, rooftops — and ask what else these surfaces could mean. That inquisitiveness, more than any subscriber statistic, is their most artful gift.

Storror’s uneasy diplomacy between insurgent practice and media fluency encapsulates a contemporary condition: the artist-athlete who both resists and leverages spectacle. In doing so they have evolved parkour from a subcultural practice into a form that is at once performative, cinematic and historically legible — a body of work that insists the city is always an artwork in waiting.