Alyssa Walker, Buloke Times

For the second year in a row, Backflips Against Bullying has put on a parkour performance at Donald High School, weaving tools and life lessons in amongst their dynamic tricks.

This year’s visit, on October 3, was a particularly dreary, rainy day, so the Year 7-11 students all gathered under the cover of the Big Shed to watch Luca and Sam’s bombastic performance, interspersed with a variety of tips and tricks on how to de-escalate bullying situations.

It’s easy to view the whole situation in black-and-white, where there is an obvious victim and perpetrator, but Luca and Sam opened the demonstration with a role-play scenario full of parkour, and demonstrated not only how complex their backflips were, but also how complex people are. Sam was bullying Luca in said scenario, but, unbeknown to Luca, Sam was also being bullied herself.

This brought forth the question, posed to the students, about why people feel the need to bully others in the first place. After brainstorming, the students settled on the key words of “power” and “control”. “The root cause for most bullies,” Luca and Sam expanded upon, “stems from feeling a lack of power and / or control in their own life. In seeking to regain some semblance of power and / or control, they turn to exerting it over other people.”

What do they want?

This, in turn, led to another question for the gathered school: “What do bullies want?”

“A reaction,” was the answer, almost immediate. If bullies seek power and / or control, then by reacting to bullying with anger, embarrassment, or upset, that’s giving the bullies exactly what they want.

But everyone knows that. Everyone, at some point or another in their lives, has been told that before. The harder part is knowing how not to react, and what to do instead.

So that’s when Luca and Sam called upon some student volunteers to help them with this exact scenario, because it’s easy to say “do this”; it’s much more efficient to show it in practice.

This was a game that had been played the previous year, and was certainly a crowd favourite, as the volunteers were eager. Run in the style of a game show, the “contestants” were introduced: Logan Eerdan, Charlotte Bicket, and Oakley Brennan. Each was given the task of insulting Luca as continuously as they possibly could (which elicited quite the number of laughs from the rest of the students), with Luca reacting to them in different ways.

If the students successfully insulted Luca continuously, they would win, but if Luca managed to get any of them to stop before the minute was up, he would win.

Logan

First up was Logan, starting strong by effectively calling Luca a raging dumpster fire of a human being, to which Luca responded by acting out and growing aggressive in kind – which, as was pointed out at the end of the minute, wasn’t exactly effective at getting the bullying to stop, was it?

Charlotte

Next up was Charlotte, who, immediately after her first insult, had to deal with a Luca who had burst into tears. Though the acting elicited many more laughs from the crowd, it, too, was seen to be a highly ineffective way of getting bullying to stop, with Charlotte the winner after the minute was up.

Oakley

And then it was Oakley’s go. Immediately after the first insult, Luca responded with, “I really like your shoes, man. They’re so cool.”

And a stunned Oakley simply said, “Oh, thanks.”

This caused the most laughs of all, as Oakley’s minute-long insult stream was ended before it could barely begin.

However, it also highlighted, in a fun and easy manner, the effectiveness of simply being nice. It’s quite difficult to be mean to someone when they’re being kind, after all. And here, Luca and Sam highlighted the importance of confidence in confrontations.

Compassion

It takes a different type of confidence and sense of self to be capable of compassion in the face of conflict, but, as Luca and Sam earnestly explained, everyone is capable of it.

In another role-play demonstration rife with backflips and impressive gymnastic feats, Sam and Luca showed just how key confidence can be – in terms of standing strong in both parkour and bullying.

Sam drew the demonstration to a close with a number of potentially confronting questions for the students, showing how bullying impacts so many people in daily life, and that it can have a serious impact on quality, safely, and security of life – with consequences that can possibly last well into adulthood.

This was shown in one final volunteer act:

Asking for two new students, Ben Perry and Halle Rice were highly confused when Luca handed them each a piece of paper, said it was his favourite piece of paper in the world, then told them to scrunch it up. Though the rest of the crowd laughed when Luca repeatedly and comically yelled at Ben and Halle for destroying his favourite paper, only to tell them that it was okay and to throw it on the ground, stomp on it, saying he wouldn’t get mad this time, he promised – the analogy became evident when Ben and Halle were asked to apologise to the paper at the very end, and unscrunch it so it was exactly how it was when it was first handed to them.

Wonderful message

Backflips Against Bullying has not only wonderful gymnastic tricks, but also a wonderful message to impart to the students. The proof that people can change and grow, Luca said how he was not only bullied in school, but also was a bully to try and cope with that, mirroring the first scenario he and Sam played out. Sam also expressed how it’s okay to feel mad or sad or frustrated if you’re being bullied still, just ultimately remember that the bullying honestly doesn’t have anything to do with you, and everything to do with the bully’s own sense of self-worth.

After imparting these last few tips and tricks – quite literally, when the duo lined up and somersaulted over the heads of twelve students – Backflips Against Bullying packed up their mats and triangles and headed home for Melbourne. And though they departed, hopefully the insights they shared will be remembered by the students for a long time.

A big thank you to Sarah O’Brien for co-ordinating everything.

This article appeared in The Buloke Times, 13 October 2023.