What Parkour Has Taught Me About Being a Musician & Life, Part 3
The Importance of Relating to the Ground
Considering the relationship to the ground is really important in Parkour. Miscalculating a landing, take off or movement can be uncomfortable, even painful. (I have learned this the hard way, ouch.)
Likewise, how a musician relates to the ground, impacts coordination and ease as they play. Relating well to the ground, allows the musician to transcend the busy subdivisions of the music and float (physically) in the long line.
Relating to the ground is about working with gravity and enjoying the equal and opposite force of gravity, the normal force. The normal force buoys us up if we allow it.
We can allow it by releasing excess muscle tension, any holding, and bracing as we play. Helpful imagery for this is allowing the bones of the skeleton to support you. Then learning to move in balance, allowing movement to resonate through the body.
I love the powerful cue of allowing movement to resonate!
Just as sound travels or resonates in space, movement can resonate or flows through the body. For example, fingers move to change pitch. Fingers are the big movers here, but it is equally important to consider the support that comes from wrists, forearms, elbows, upper arms, shoulder joints, shoulder blades, collarbones, sternum, whole skeleton. In fact, some of the finger moving muscles are located in the forearm near the elbow.
In Parkour, we learn to land safely in a jump. We don’t just land flat-footed, we land on the balls of our feet and allow the force of our landing to resonate up through ankle, knee, and hip joints. Moving well also requires us to sense the relationships of body parts along with the relationship to the environment.
If this sounds like a lot, it is until we practice. Parkour is one of my learning laboratories. I build up knowledge of how I relate by starting small and safe, distances grow and intensities increase as I accumulate experience.
As we practice, include awareness of your relationship to the ground. Starting “small and safe” can be cultivating a great relationship in tone and technique, then growing into repertoire in isolated measures or phrases.
The only way to harness the power of the ground in your playing is to practice it every day, and not just when the instrument is in hand, when you are out and about, jumping, running, climbing.
Be curious…