"Parkour? What the hell is parkour?" That’s what I thought on first hearing the name from the mouth of lanky Wits University drama student Paul Gray.

Gray, who has been practising parkour for four months, tries to explain, using phrases such as “complete economy of movement”. I leave intrigued and bemused. But, as I discover in the next few weeks, bemusement is to be expected -- parkour is hard to define. But it has become a global movement, with a dedicated, close-knit and passionate following in South Africa.

Started and formalised in the early Nineties in Lisses, a suburb of Paris, by David Belle, parkour has been chronicled and spread through the internet. It involves moving through the environment -- principally the urban environment -- overcoming obstacles only through physical manoeuvres.

Employing a number of basic movements, practitioners are supposed to get from one place to another, “flowing” over any obstacle they encounter swiftly and efficiently.

Watching a couple of training sessions or “jams” around Jozi reveals that even simple movements can be tough -- and some might take years to master. Typical moves by an experienced “traceur” (male practitioner) or “traceuse” (female practitioner) are long leaps from one high building to another, hair-raising runs down stair railings or up steep walls.

According to Wikipedia, “parkour” is derived from the French word “parcours” or route. “Traceur” is also French, from the verb “tracer”, to trace. So, a parkour practitioner is someone who traces a route through his or her surroundings.

For the handful of South African traceurs and traceuses, parkour is an art form, a physical challenge and an escape, requiring discipline and courage.

Dragging myself out of bed on a Saturday morning, I go to watch one of their jam sessions on the roof of a Johannesburg shopping mall. It is cold as eight traceurs begin their jam, practising vaults, precision jumps and rolls under a clear winter sky. Their antics draw curious stares from shoppers who have parked their cars nearby.

Parkour often is misunderstood by observers and, particularly security guards, who tend to mistake it for the shenanigans of juvenile delinquents.

“We tend to go to places where we know we won’t be bothered,” says Neil Craig, traceur and acting president of Parkour South Africa (PKSA), the country’s foremost parkour body. Craig is a web developer who runs the PKSA website, the heartbeat of the local parkour community. It is the first port of call for would-be traceurs, where they organise training sessions, compare notes and give ­encouragement.

Central to the morning’s exercise is a set of four parallel rails for trolleys, along which they run and over which they vault. Then they move to a building on the roof; they run to the top of its 2,5m wall and dismount in leaps.

The next exercise involves “monkey vaulting”, diving at a low wall and pivoting through one’s arms to achieve the greatest possible distance. Manoeuvres have specialised names: a “lazy vault” involves transferring one’s weight from one hand to the other, for example.

Moving away from the mall to a nearby street, the traceurs descend a staircase in a series of perilous high-speed vaults and precision jumps over the railings without touching the stairs. This is a dummy run -- PKSA has yet to undertake a full-scale “choreographed” run through the city, as others have done elsewhere. An example was a race between a Peugeot 207 and two traceurs through the streets of Liverpool last year -- the traceurs won.

PKSA was established in 2003, when Craig’s friend Dane Grant returned from a stint in London, where he encountered the British movement. Parkour in the United Kingdom receives far more recognition, says Craig. “Here we get ridiculed a lot. But in Europe there is much more exposure and a broader following.”

Grant has returned to the UK, where he is part of the internationally known Team Traceur.

The movement has made its mark on popular culture; it has been showcased in movies like Casino Royal, adverts and music videos. It has featured in a number of documentaries, most famously Channel 4’s Jump London.

Local traceurs have been snapped up already to do ads, music videos and films. They are part of Footskating 101, the latest Crazy Monkey movie.

Said Jacky Ho, a 19-year-old Wits accounting student and parkour addict since the age of 15: “At first, ­people’s perceptions are just of some guys jumping off buildings, but once you get into it it’s a way of life.” Part of Moyo Africa, SA’s flagship Parkour team, he has worked on films, music videos and adverts.

Like any other martial art or extreme sport, parkour requires a good grasp of basics, say practitioners. And physical strength and agility: most practitioners have some experience of gymnastics or martial arts. “You’ve got to start small to get big,” says Ciaran O’Kelly, a 21-year-old theatre and film technician, who been training for four years. Seeing beginners take on dangerous jumps without mastering the fundamentals makes him nervous, he says.

But the traceurs express high hopes for the future of the sport in South Africa. Says Mpho Ramathe (21), a Wits media and philosophy student: “I’d like to see it grow and for people to see it as a means of expressing themselves, a form of freedom.”