David Banks: Endurance challenges, performance art, and recovery
What inspires the integration of movement disciplines, performance art, and endurance challenges to create a meaningful cultural and personal impact?
Is parkour about athleticism, or performance art? To David Banks, it is both at once. He shares his movement journey and inspirations, from martial arts to parkour to drama. David unpacks some of his projects, including the Movement Card and his various charity endurance challenges. He discusses performance art and how it relates to his parkour practice, and reflects on injury and recovery.
“What is difficult is that our current urban conditions reject the possibility for a creativity in urban spaces. This is often—in Scotland because of social contracts, as opposed to written law. It’s ‘Get down off that wall.’ ‘You’re not allowed to do this, I’m phoning the police.’ For people that maybe don’t practice parkour that are listening to this, you might think, ‘You just tell him it’s fine, you just wait for the police to come.’ But the amount of times I’ve taken an hour or two out of my training over the years to deal with that, is just very frustrating.” ~ David Banks (12:45)
David Banks is an artist and mover from Glasgow, Scotland. As a co-founder of the company Ukemi, he merges his background in art and parkour by creating projects that encourage play, improve health, and make movement accessible in urban areas. David has been a part of various projects through Ukemi, collaborating on Youth Urban Games festival and creating the Ukemi card game.
This conversation explores the multifaceted intersections of movement, performance art, and personal development. The discussion begins with the inspiration behind integrating artistic and athletic disciplines, as exemplified by an enduring fascination with characters like Spider-Man. David explains how this passion evolved into a commitment to parkour, boxing, and mixed martial arts, as well as how these practices contributed to storytelling and artistic expression.
The conversation goes into various projects, including the creation of the Movement Card, which aims to clarify legal rights for movement practitioners in different countries. The conversation also highlights endurance events such as crawling eight miles to raise funds for charity and the ambition to complete a rail marathon. These endeavors underline the speaker’s commitment to using movement as a medium for personal and social change, while emphasizing themes like injury, recovery, and the pursuit of authenticity in artistic expression.
Takeaways
Creative endurance events — Highlighting the significance of pushing personal and physical boundaries to achieve societal and artistic goals.
Parkour’s cultural and personal dimensions — Discussing how parkour combines physicality with storytelling and cultural commentary.
Legal and societal barriers — Examining how societal norms and legal frameworks shape the accessibility and acceptance of movement in urban spaces.
Artistic purity — Reflecting on reducing complex ideas to their rawest, most meaningful expressions through performance art.
Personal growth through movement — Emphasizing movement disciplines as tools for overcoming trauma and building mental resilience.
Resources
Parkour Outreach — An organization collaborating on movement and accessibility projects.
Parkour Earth — A global organization aiming to promote and protect the practice of parkour.
(Written with help from Chat-GPT.)
— Hello👋 I’m Craig Constantine.
In the Movers Mindset podcast, I talk with movement enthusiasts to learn who they are, what they do, and why they do it. I’m interested in the nature and philosophy of movement and in exploring themes like independence, self-direction, and human excellence. My interests color each conversation and provide some structure to Movers Mindset. But since I like to take the scenic route, every conversation ends up going somewhere unique.
The purpose of Movers Mindset is to create and share great conversations with movement enthusiasts. Each conversation feeds my insatiable curiosity, but I share them to turn on a light for someone else, to inspire them, or to give them their next question.
I appreciate your time and attention, and I don’t take it for granted.
— Thank you!
My personal mission is creating better conversations to spread understanding and compassion. And Movers Mindset is one of the things I do in service of my mission. Drop by https://craigconstantine.com/ for my weekly email, my other podcasts, writing and more.
The Movers Mindset project grew from conversations I started having as part of my personal journey rediscovering movement. The project started late in 2015, and it was initially simply a web site that shared others’ writing. The project grew, and in 2017 I started the podcast. I’ve worked extremely hard, but none of this would have been possible without so much help from so many people.
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