Yesterday, for the first time in months I watched some dressage-to-music on TV. The sound quality of the music was awful but the horses & some of the riders were magnificent. I have seen exquisite thoroughbreds & Arabs, coats gleaming, beautifully turned-out, moving with grace & confidence. I have watched countless cowboy movies with the cowboys cantering & galloping horses of various shapes & hues, & the Native American's head-tossing, spirited,bare-back mounts. Innumerable beloved ponies, hacks, cobs & riding-school mounts have passed before me. Without doubt, the only ridden horses that make me stop-in-my-tracks to watch them are beautifully schooled dressage horses, of any level.
Dressage horses at the top of their art, at Prix-St.George level & above, are truly the elite athletes of the horse world. Those trained to this level with sensitivity, care, patience & real knowledge are a joy to watch, happy in their work. Partner this with a skilled, sensitive & courageous rider & the potential to see the magnificence of the horse shine through is there. It is possible to indirectly sense the power of a movement, as a breeze accompanying the passing horse. It is possible to visually witness the grace of a well-executed manoeuvre, a pirouette, a piaffe, even a high-school jump. But only when the horse & rider are working as one joyful, moving partnership is it possible to feel, as a spectator, the essence of horse. It's heart, it's purpose, it's life-force, it's power. All the sensory components may be there, but these alone do not reveal what a horse is - witness the near-impossibility of finding a horse portrait, sculpture or artistic representation that has "life". Horses are creatures of movement - as a car only comes to life when it moves, it's soul is released & revealed in motion, so it is with the horse. The colours, nuances, range, limitations, magnificence's are teased-out & predictably displayed by a master driver & rider under precise, testing conditions. My own personal make-up attunes me to certain aspects of physical & "spiritual" power", it's grace, poetry, scale. A top-flight race-horse is no less an athlete than a top-flight dressage horse but explosively-released power travelling directly from A to B, this revelation of power does not affect me in the same way as a balletically-moving horse. I love dance & music and in these too I respond to grace, elegance, order and that most elusive of virtues - beauty. I can appreciate most types of dance but only get pleasure if beauty is there whether it be in the interpretation of the music or the story, revealed in the lines made by the dancers, or more rarely & magnificently, when the essence of the whole performance becomes known. Like that moment when a poem stops being words & leaps out as "thing" - the word, sound, smell, person, place, object that IS the poem. And so back to the dancing horse & rider - my own little grey mare is now semi-retired but I know that inside her will always be that essence-of-horse all horses share but only some can reveal to us limited humans.
(I've lost track of who owns the photo of Goldstern)
