Pursuing praxis

These days, not too many people know what a horse nut I used to be. I dabbled in just about anything that didn’t require a carraige. My most serious interests were dressage, jumping, combined training, and horse judging. I tried to explain dressage to someone unfamiliar with it, and rather than struggle on verbally with the aid of locomotory gestures. (Heaven help you if you have to act out ‘dressage’ for charades). What I should have done was look it up on YouTube. Which is what I did last night, after about a 10 year hiatus from all things dressage.

So what is it? It’s kind of like figure skating for horses, minus the ice and skates and froofy costumes. If you’re curious, here are probably two of the best horse and rider combos in the world today.

The gray horse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKQgTiqhPbw
The dark horse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPJGEzI3aIc

These clips are from the World Equestrian Games 2006, in the freestyle. Freestyle means they get to compose their own pattern to execute specified moves, and they get to ride to music also of their choosing. I actually like the gray horse better overall, and the commentators occasionally lapsed into silence just to watch, she was that spectacular. But the dark horse was technically and artistically perfect, pretty much.

Maybe it’s relevant to mention the gray horse is female. I’ve been asked if all the best horses are male. Maybe more male than female, but this horse rocks my world.

To give you an idea of scoring: it’s out of 100 points, judged by upwards of 5 judges at this level. Scoring in the 50’s is like C performance (decent but in need of improvement), 60s are solid B-B+ performances to be proud of, 70’s are A+ performances to celebrate. The dark horse, w/ Dutch rider Anky Van Grunsven won by a 5 point margin with 86 points. God couldn’t perform that well, even if he had four legs and a beautiful woman on his back.

Terminology:
Piaffe: trot in place, pick the feet up high
Passage (rhymes with massage): prance slowly forward in a trot, hesitating mid-stride
Canter pirouette: canter in a circle, keeping the hind legs as close to the same spot as possible
Half-pass: trot or canter diagonally across the arena while keeping the horse pointed forward and bent in the direction of travel.