Mercedes BenzSo the performance today that I haven’t been able to tell anyone about until now, was for MERCEDES BENZ! We did two performances today and what seemed like a billion run-throughs (for the light guys, sound guys, camera guys, client preview, timing, etc) for the unveiling of the C-class automobiles in Hong Kong :)
We put an incredible amount of work into this and it definitely paid off. People were blown away, there is hardly any parkour or freerunning in Hong Kong and these VIPs had never seen anything like it before! Our biggest problem was people actually trying to get too close to the performance area where we needed to land (I ended up having to throw some pretty sketchy flips in order to not land on people…) The CEO of Mercedes Benz even came out and thanked us personally afterward, he’s a really nice guy!

I’m serious about the amount of work though, they are definitely going to remember us. We spent something around 6 hours helping to get stuff set up late the night before (they built the whole set in 28 hours). The freakiest part was setting up the fricking gantry - a suspended bridge five and a half meters up above the ground. After our exhausting 3 minute performance we were expected to jump up to and climb up this shaky suspended bridge, run across to a nearby tower, and backflip off into a hidden net with a pad in it above the cars. The prob was that this climb up was incredibly difficult the way they first had it set up, not even taking into account how tired we are at this point. Originally they had two bars close together with a sheet of plywood placed on top, basically the hardest possible configuration because you couldn’t utilize the top bar because of the plywood and the distance between the bottom and top of the bridge was too far to do a reverse swing up… The solution? I grabbed a knife, climbed up underneath, cut the zip ties holding the plywood on, and pushed it up and slid it out of the way (while upside-down ;) ). Then we moved around some adjustable bars and made ourselves a nice little ladder like thing in the middle.

After grabbing a quick bit a sleep we were there again early in the morning to rehearse for the rehearsals. This time the problems came in the form of slippery tape and dangerous rugs. Apparently sufficiently grippy tape is a rarity in Hong Kong, but eventually we got a hold of some stuff that worked well enough. The weirdest thing though was definitely the carpet. I think they replaced some portions of it that got damaged while moving stuff with smaller squares of the same material. The problem we found was that it was impossible to tell which sections had been replaced and which hadn’t. This was a serious problem because whenever you stepped on a replaced section of carpet it had a tendency to slip out under you and deposit you rather abruptly onto your ass. The solution? Pulling almost all of it back up and taping the hell out of it :)
It was all totally worth it though, hearing a crowd of 800 business men suck in their breaths at once at the first synchronized wall flips is the sound of success. And it’s really not that big of a deal when things go awry, traceurs are some of the most adaptable performers out there, I mean that is basically what we are training for, to be as adaptable as possible. The level of precision and adaptability we train for every day really shows when you are out on a commercial set with only one take to do something perfectly with no practice, or when you are doing a fast-paced performance and have to totally change how you land to avoid the crowd. I feel very lucky that I discovered parkour when I did, not only is it opening so many doors for me now, but I feel absolutely incredible practicing it - everything else in the world just simply fades away into absolute focus.

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