Eric Gaskins Vol 14: Dressage
Dressage, or as the French refer to it as Haute Ecole for horse and rider is the equivalent of Haute Couture in the equestrian sports. The easiest description is dancing on horseback. Unlike thoroughbred racing or jumping, it’s fast becoming one of the most popular horse sports to watch and certainly the most difficult and beautiful discipline to ride. It is the ultimate experience of horse and rider working as one. As simple as it may sound, it is the toughest sport, which you can spend a lifetime trying to perfect. That’s also the beauty of it, one can ride Dressage until advanced age as long as you have enough energy and good enough balance to climb on and stay on. You’re maybe wondering where this is going. I want to share with you the ultimate passion that competes with the others in my life: Fashion, my mate and my friends.
Riding and horses have always captured my imagination. There is some thing chemical about my love for them. I have never felt more me than when I’m riding, training, competing or just in a horse barn. The smell alone can send me to the most exquisite place. The feeling of a horse, his power and strength underneath you, but following your commands by way of your seat, legs and hands, is like no other thrill I know. After a particularly good ride, my trainer would say, “It’s better than sex”, and he was often right. To take a horses strength that typically moves forward with speed and contain it underneath you so that his movement becomes more suspended than racing forward is like a bouncing ball that is 1500 lbs. of controlled turbo power. If you get that, then you start to know what this can feel like. Imagine trotting on one spot, or even galloping without covering ground but essentially going in slow motion. Those are just two examples of what dressage can be about.
So the training of the horse to learn these “tricks” and to learn how to “ask” him to do it with imperceptible signals of legs, hand and seat is what the art of riding is all about. I learned this by accident because I was riding a horse that always left me on my butt in the dirt. My teacher at the time, who taught jumping, suggested I take some lessons with a trainer from Holland, Jan, who was a drill general. Once I started with him, I realized I knew nothing about horses except to point them at a fence that grew steadily higher and prayed I would be alive and in one piece on the other side. Jan took me back to the basics and remade me as a rider. Once I had a peek at the difficulty of the sport I never looked at another fence. I was hooked. I went from lesson to lesson on weekends in East Hampton, to leasing a horse and eventually buying the first of two. I lived for the weekend when I could race to the barn at 8 a.m. for my lessons on the weekend. I couldn’t wait to go to sleep just so I could be at the barn. It’s so much like fashion design because one is always striving for an effortless seeming perfection. This sport, like fashion, is the essence of refinement. And like the art and skill of a great designer, it takes an awful lot of time, trial and error to break through to the next level. The beauty of it is that you never arrive. There is always more to learn and a better, more elegant and effective way to express what it is you’re trying to create.
My good fortune has always dropped me in the right place at the right time. It was that way with my collections and also with my riding. One moment I was on my butt in the dirt, the next I was riding under Jan at a barn with 3 Olympic team hopefuls, Jan being one of them. Imagine what it was like to ride in the same ring with another rider and his horse that went on to help win an Olympic Bronze medal for the U.S Team. I’ll leave you with a video of one of the most beautiful horse and rider combinations to win the World Championships. This, the third leg of the competition decided the individual gold medal. It is called the Kur, or musical free-style where the horse and rider “dance “ to a choreographed piece of music. The beauty of this animal, so imbued with a perfect sense of rhythm and the rider who asks him to dance with what look like no cues, is astounding. This is why I love Dressage and will never give it up until I’m gone. Enjoy!
Eric Gaskins ….. The Emperors Old Clothes
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