Our final days of class time were all about Finesse. Even though dressage has its roots in martial history, we learned that Finesse shouldn’t be a military-like exercise of rigid precision; instead, it should be a fluid, supple dance with your horse where you lead him, like a dance partner, by what you’re doing in your own body.
Accordingly, we watched a video of Fred and Ginger dancing and observed how much Fred does in his own body: even though Ginger does more of the big flourishy moves, Fred is matching her energy and grace, not just standing rigidly by while she dances. And although there is a lot of structure in their bodies as they dance, there’s also a lot of flexibility and freedom of motion.
Perhaps less intuitively, we also watched a video of Russian martial arts. Personally, I can see a lot of overlap between martial arts and dancing (and few of my dance partners will be surprised by this), but the main point was for us to learn to adopt a stance, akin to a balance point in riding, where you are stable enough to be fluid and move either your whole body or your individual body parts with ease while remaining balanced. The coolest part was when we paired up and tried to put each other in headlocks when we were in our normal postures (easy to do) and in the martial stance (impossible because the person just rolls smoothly away without even trying, following the momentum of the attacker).
These two videos came together when we watched a video of a bullfight done from horseback (with the sage advice to focus on the horse and not on the bull). The horse and rider were amazing. Despite that fact that a bull’s attack is very like a battle scene, the two of them were literally just dancing out of the way of the bull’s horns. Even when the horse was cantering sideways, it looked almost effortless, not unlike the martial arts expert whose suppleness allowed him to let attacks just roll past him.
Finesse, then, requires balance and structure without rigidity. In all there are 4 things you need to have before you start riding with contact:
1. the ability to stay on your balance point
2. the ability to move with your horse (fluidity)
3. light responses from your horse in Freestyle and Online
4. complete absence of the BS rein
The BS rein is any time you’re pulling back (as opposed to up) on your rein for any reason, and any time you’re using two reins when you should be using only one. But for the purposes of Finesse, it also means pretty much any time you’re using your reins to perform what Pat calls “gross motor skills”: disengaging, turning, and going backwards and sideways. Before you begin Finesse, you should be able to do all of these things without your reins so that the reins can be reserved for shaping the horse’s body instead of steering him.
I had been working on this a little before I got to the course, but it’s one thing to practice these moves in isolation; it’s another to change completely the lifetime habit of mind that tells you to pull on the reins to go right, left, and stop. I found this out when Pete was coaching me on the soft feel: once you get a little right-brained, you lose all awareness of what you’re doing with your reins (and what you’re doing with them is usually not pretty).
In fact, I had even found during our Freestyle sessions how very hard it is to keep the casual rein planted on the horse’s neck when doing things like riding the rail—I tended to keep my arm just that little bit bent so that I was more ready to correct than I was trusting that my horse would do the right thing.
I had been riding without reins a good bit, so I was surprised that this was a problem, but it’s easy to resist the temptation to abuse your reins when you don’t have them in your hands. Once they’re in your hands again, it’s equally easy to revert to old habits. This point was driven home to me when I heard one of the coaches tell another student not to fold their arms while riding the patterns because they already know that we can resist using our reins if they’re not in our hands, but they want to see us be able to resist using them when they are in our hands. That’s a whole new ballgame that I’m going to have to practice a lot now that I’m at home, along with doing a lot of passenger lessons to get my balance point better and learn to really move with my horse.
In any case, once you have the foundation, then the absolute key to Finesse is to do in your body what you want your horse to do in his (and then stay out of his way while he does it). We spent a lot of time doing simulations that would allow us to learn what we needed to be doing in our own bodies.
First, we paired up and did some rein simulations with our savvy strings to understand the concept of the “soft feel.” This was a huge breakthrough for me because when I take a feel I tend to put too much slack in the reins, imagining that this is kinder and softer for my horse. What I found out is that slack actually results in jerkiness; it feels much better if firm contact, like that between dance partners, is maintained. Then you have a feel to follow the whole time so that communication is consistent and clear, and movements in the rein are smooth.
Next, we moved into how to shape our own bodies for different moves. John had already had us on all fours in previous weeks to feel what the horse needs to be able to do to accomplish different moves. He’d also had us cantering around on our own two legs and playing with transitions to understand where our weight needed to be. Now he had us hook up into 3-person congo horses with the reins guiding the person in front and with the person in back responding to the hip movement of the “rider” by holding onto their belt loops with straight arms.
Over the course of the week, we practiced shoulders-in, haunches-in, leg-yielding, half-passing, and simple canter transitions on a serpentine. It was amazing how much feedback you got just from what the humans attached to you did in response to your movements, and of course it was also instructive to be the horse and find out what different movements feel like coming through the reins. (It wasn’t so instructive to be the horse’s rear end—in that position you’re just kind of having to waddle around a lot.)
We practiced these moves in the Precision Pen—Pat’s version of a dressage arena that has a grid chalked onto it so that you can be precise about finding your 10m and 20m circles, for example. We spent a few sessions learning how to set up a precision pen—or rather, figuring it out for ourselves. We were given the measurements of the sides and where the letters and numbers went and then left on our own to figure out how to lay it out so that it would be straight and precise.
Molly did give us a hint, though: she asked if anyone knew the formula for a square corner. Always the nerdy student, I blurted out “three four five” before I thought about it, and I wound up nominated to start the pen with the first corner.
Well, one of my main points in wanting to do well on the theory test was to prove that you can know the theory and still be pretty sad when it comes to applying it. That goes for building things as well as horsemanship. I knew the formula because I had studied fence building with a friend in Louisiana; however, I have only built fences with rounded corners in lines that didn’t need to be square on my farm, so I haven’t had a chance to practice using it. I tried to warn my group about this, but I still got stuck with the corner. It wasn't that I minded doing it, but I could tell that my fellow students' patience with my indecision about how best to proceed was beginning to wear thin. Happily, a guy in our class who works in construction finally stepped in and took over.
Afterwards, Molly told us she had set the session up that way so that we would learn about our own leadership tendencies and how we work in a group. The rest of the group took this to heart over the next couple of days and worked on perfecting group dynamics and shaving minutes off of our precision pen construction. I had already learned my lesson: that I have a pretty high tolerance for muddling through things and figuring them out as a I go along, but that other people don’t have the same tolerance and enthusiasm for muddling through with me. As a problem-solving technique, muddling is okay, but as a leadership skill it’s a bit lacking.
So I’m going to try to resist the urge to do that when it comes to riding Finesse, instead using the tools I learned in my course to get a clear idea of what I’m doing before I ask my horse to join me.
No comments:
Post a Comment