what is yamakasi?

[ef1]

yamakasi-strong body,strong mind,strong spirit.
if you ask the french what freerunning is ? they will shrug there shoulders, but if you describe the moves and concepts of freerunning they will say "YAMAKASI"
yamakasi is the team that david belle and sebastian foucan trained with. david belle inspired by his fathers usefullness took some of the efficient moves and created the parkour ideals, sebastian came to england, made the jump programs where he doesnt mention parkour or yamakasi but did mention the word freerunning,which is now in common use.
most of what we know about parkour is from written interviews with david belle and a short 10 min vid .
anyone who has watched the 'generation yamakasi' one hour documentary will see that they have been doing their art long before the jump london/britain series with some footage of the yamakasi in 1990 showing how skilled disciplined and how many moves they allready possesed.
anyone who knows about 'parkour philosophy' has only to watch 'generation yamakasi' where they talk about being usefull and a helpfull member of society, as well as talking about exercises where they learnt to trust each other with there lives.
they chose the name yamakasi meaning 'strong body,strong mind,strong spirit, because they felt this describes best what they were trying to achieve.
you wont find no big sponsered yamakasi website with individual promotion and 'yamakasi'clothing range. but what you will find if you watch there documentary is a team who know what they are talking about and are a shining example of helping others, there work with children and work with prisoners to name a few.
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3773384792923323349&q=generation+yamakasi&pl=true

[fogs]

Good work Eff-ers.
If you keep at it the realisation will sink in after a while.

[ef1]

here is a continuation of the history;thanks to Faelcind Il Danach

But basically it works like this David learned the techniques that would become parkour doing the natural method and gymnastics with his father, when they moved to lisses he started taking those techniques out into the streets and a group of his freinds became interested. Included in that group, were his cousins Williams Belle and Chau Belle Dinh (David is either 1/4 or 1/2 vietnamese I am not sure) Yahn and Frederic Hnautra(Yahn was in both Yamakasi films) and Sebastian foucan. Who started training with him when and how much of what the did derived directly from David and his fathers teaching is a matter of debate. Up untill 1998 the generally called what they did L'art Du Deplacement or the art of movement and it seems to have included both acrobatics and more efficient techniques. Eventually the came to call there group les yamakasi. It was in 1997 or 1998 that the broke up their are two different accounts as to why one was over doing a circus act and the other was because the were offered the film the story about the film is that David did not approve of the script because the art was used for theft in the film.

After David broke with Yamakasi he formed a new group Les Traceurs which included Foucan, Stephane vigroux, Johan Vigroux, Rudy Duong, Romain Moutalt, Karim, Kazuma and others it was also at this time that David's friend Hebert kounde came up with the term Parkour to designate the art David taught and practiced. Les Traceurs were the group that was featured in the nike comercials, and in some of the more famous early parkour videos, like La Releve, traceurs.avi, le parkour.tv la minute, fort, on remet ca, Slow MO etc. Foucan and David broke with each other after Jump london when Foucan neglected to mention David or Raymond belle(davids father) as being important in the orgin of the discipline during the documentary.

The Yamakasi went there own way and did the two films and eventually the generetion yamakasi video, in the video the still refer to their art as L'art du Deplacement and other more acrobatics oriented teams like Team adrenaline do as well. I think refering to l'art du deplacement as yamakasi was orginaly pop culture response to the films as opposed to coming from the yamakasi.


In my mind their are two disciplines, Parkour and L"art Du Deplacement. Free running, is just a synonym for L'art Du Deplacement so is yamakasi.

[fogs]

To add a little more clarity regarding use of the term Freerunning.
Freerunning is a term that I have been familiar with since the early 80's. It refers to (as i understand it) running or jogging with jumps and rolls and tucks and those sort of more dynamic training moves incorporated. Just making jogging more interesting and challenging really. In the old days there was none of this fancy Parkour stuff. Keeping fit never really had any cross over between any of the aspects that make up modern freerunning.
It definitely isnt a term that was invented by Foucan in the Jump films. Freerunning originates well before that.

[ef1]

Question and answer session with yamakasi
parkour-videos.com/yamakasi-answers-rendezvous-2/