An indoor school for haute ecole – and the movements were battlefield techniques before they were displays
Riding House Fitzrovia holds a 4.4 from four thousand five hundred and sixty-two people, charges twenty to thirty pounds, and a riding house was an indoor school.
What it was for
Teaching a horse haute ecole – the high school of classical riding.
Which is what most people call dressage, and which looks, to a modern audience, like a horse dancing.
And it is not dancing.
It is military training.
The airs above the ground
Which are the spectacular movements – and every one of them was, or is claimed to have been, a combat manoeuvre.
The levade – the horse rears and holds, balanced on its hind legs, absolutely still.
Which puts the rider high, and puts the horse’s body between the rider and what is in front of him.
The courbette – a series of hops on the hind legs, moving forward.
And the capriole, which is the extraordinary one: the horse leaps into the air, all four feet off the ground, and kicks out violently backwards at the top of the jump.
Into the faces of anybody who has come up behind you.
Whether that is quite true
The Prat has looked, as always.
The military-origin explanation is the traditional one, taught in the great riding schools, and it is repeated everywhere.
And a number of serious historians of horsemanship think it is substantially romanticised – that the movements developed as displays of control and training, in a courtly context, and the battlefield rationale was attached afterwards.
The tellable version wins. A thousand and eighty-two articles.
What is not disputed
Is the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, which has been doing this since the sixteenth century, in an indoor riding house, continuously.
And its Lipizzaner stallions, which are born dark – black or bay – and turn white as they mature.
Which takes years, and which is why a young Lipizzaner in the school is the wrong colour, and why tradition holds that one dark horse is kept in the stable for luck.
And they were rescued
In 1945, at the end of the war, with the Soviets advancing and the horses starving and at risk of being eaten.
And an American general – Patton, who had been an Olympic horseman – authorised an operation to get them out.
It is one of the very few things in the collapse of Nazi Germany that anybody can tell as a straightforwardly good story.
Verdict
Good room, honest number on a large sample.
Go, and do not kick backwards.
Why indoors
Which is the boring and interesting answer.
Because a riding house is a covered arena – and it exists because you cannot train a horse to this standard on ground that is frozen in January and baked in August.
The footing has to be consistent.
And a horse learning a movement that requires enormous precision cannot be asked to do it on a surface that changes every week.
So somebody built a very large shed, at enormous expense, to control the ground.
It is the same argument as the walled rooftop and the igloo: the weather is the enemy, and the only reliable answer is to put a roof on it.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
