About a month ago, our fabulous local dressage trainer posted something on Facebook about starting an equestrian book club. “Talking about the Saddle Club books with friends?” I thought, “I’m so in!” It took about 4 seconds for me to realize that, being adults, we’d be discussing training and horsemanship books, but my excitement didn’t waver, especially when mention of snacks and wine came up.
Here’s where I confess to being a terrible horse girl: I’ve never really read proper nonfiction books on horses. This might sound crazy, being both an avid reader and a passionate equestrian, but I remember picking up a few as a young teen outgrowing her childhood horse books and feeling completely overwhelmed and then never really trying again (sadly very on brand for me). So when Amazon delivered Nuno Oliveria’s Reflections on Equestrian Art I felt equally apprehensive and excited. Would it be over my head? How pretentious could this book be? Will it be helpful or will it say things like “one should be able to perfectly balance a glass of ‘44 merlot on the back of a warmblood and if you cannot you should simply give up now, peasant”?
To my great delight, Oilveria made his bread and butter on rather inexpensive horses, believing firmly that with patience and tact any horse can be a dressage horse. For context, Oilveria was a Portugese trainer who (somewhat liberally) followed the French School of Dressage. This favors smaller, lighter horses than the Germans I’m accustomed to, which should excite anyone who doesn’t ride a handsomely thick warmblood. (As I’ve yet to find a dressage school that favors 14 hand chonky ponies, I’ll remain neutral.) Though Oilveria died in 1989 (I guess the world couldn’t handle having both him and Taylor Swift alive at the same time) his students are alive and well and vocal about his teachings and philosophies on harmony and perfection. Read more about him here.
What is Equestrian Art?
I will confess again to being incredibly stupid; when I saw the title of the book I thought we’d be discussing classic oil paintings of horses and the long artistic history of man capturing the beauty of our noble equine partners. To be fair, the cover of the book does feature what I originally thought was a drawing of horse and rider but is actually a very old photograph. Duh. Then I got a few sentences in and learned that “equestrian art” refers instead of Oilveria’s philosophies. According to him:
Equestrian art is the perfect understanding between the rider and his horse. This harmony allows the horse to work without any contraction in his joints or in his muscles, permitting him to carry out all movements with mental and physical enjoyment, as well as with suppleness and rhythm. The horse is then a partner, rather than a slave who is enforced to obey a rigid master by constraint.
To me, this is like the nirvana of dressage, our ultimate goal and state of final perfection. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve felt perfect understanding with my horse in the last 5 years, and maybe that’s a reflection of my ability or maybe it’s a reflection of how difficult this can be to achieve. (I really hope I’m not the only one who struggles with this.) I love the idea of reaching this harmonious dressage nirvana, because of course I want my horse to be my partner (and really do think of Dizzy and all my pony pals as my partners) but find the demand of obtaining this more than a little overwhelming.
To be an Oilveria Equestrian Artist, you must be both technically knowledgeable and precise in your riding and deeply in tune with your horse’s ability. Which, duh, that’s very important, but this is also really hard. Maybe it’s because I’m not consistently riding with a trainer, but I find myself spending a lot of time analyzing Dizzy’s ability and mental state. It’s very easy to slip into overthinking and self-doubt in these times, so I also try not to do it too much...and then the existentialism kicks into high gear. How much thinking about dressage is too much thinking about dressage? At what point does it become destructive and the “shut up and ride” needs to come back? For the sake of writing a blog about a book that is about thinking about dressage, we’ll say for now “no such thing!” even though there certainly is such a thing.
Tactful Equestrians
One of the most important qualities an equestrian can possess, according to Oliveria, is tact. He urges riders to be tactful with their hands, seat, and (my favorite) head. Since it’s my favorite, let’s start with the tactful mind. Riders should reward their horse at the slightest indication of obedience, embodying Captain Beudant’s words, “ask for much, be content with little, and reward often.” Put simply, by tactfully asking your horse only for what he can do, your horse will never tire of your requests.
Only a rider who knows exactly what her horse is capable of can do this, which is easy to say and hard to do. You need to really know your horse and your discipline to confidently know where your horse draws the line on a movement. Is your horse balking at a half pass because your saddle doesn’t fit correctly and blocks his shoulder or because he hasn’t built the muscle yet or because you’re not asking correctly? I love the idea of being fully aware of your horses’s capabilities, but since they can change on a daily basis, I think it’s important for us to not get too frustrated if this is harder than anticipated.
Reading further, we got to my favorite part of the book so far, where Oliveria says that at his Portugese school, he had a horse who “did over 500 flying changes at every stride without being tired.” This is both wildly impressive and wildly horrifying to me, much like the grid exercises I see that consist of 50 bounce fences in a row except amplified by 100.
Oliveria believes that skill without tact is useless, which reminds me of the da Vinci quote “vision without execution is hallucination” mostly because of the similar sentence structure but also partly because it’s so easy to only have half an equation for success. Tact can only be obtained by the people who truly love horses and do their best to understand them.
I’ll pause here to say that, in my opinion, we can never fully know our horses, just the same way we can never fully know our partners or children or selves. This doesn’t mean we should ever stop trying to understand them as best we can, but when dealing with a living being who is the cumulation of their own experiences you’re setting yourself up to fail if you think you can only be an equestrian if you fully understand your horse. But if you pursue your riding with the mindset of always trying to know them better, to let your horse show you how they’re thinking and feeling within every situation, you’re a tactful equestrian in my book.
Luckily for the non-philosophical reader, obtaining a tactful seat and hands is much more literal. This is where lightness plays in, where a rider has an independent seat and giving hands that move with the horse in every exercise. I do appreciate that Oliveria makes a distinction between lightness and passivity, because the riders who sit very still and do nothing to help their horse can be technically light but also are fairly useless in dressage. I’m calling myself out here because I have a strange and terrible habit of abandoning my horse in a movement (or even over a fence) if I think I’m getting in the way. Oliveria wants to see an active horse and an engaged, light rider, which I see in some of our international dressage riders today, but sadly not enough of them. An engaged horse, he points out, is not one that is robotically completing the movements, but instead is active and through the entire body during a dressage test.
Of course, this great master presented us with a hundred other ideas, and maybe they’ll produce a hundred other blog posts, but I’ll leave this one with the question our dressage trainer posed and I’ve still been thinking about: “Can you have too much tact?” My initial reaction was to say that yes, you can. Working in an office I often struggle to find the best way to communicate, looking for a balance between that which is polite and professional and that which clearly and efficiently gets my point across. With horses, can we face the same challenge? I’m inclined to say yes, but would love to hear your takes!