How to teach a horse to dance

GUNTHWAITE, England — At the Paris Olympics, hundreds of competitors will try to marry athletic prowess to artistic grace, but only those competing in dressage will attempt it while sitting astride a willful animal.

Popularly known as “horse dancing,” dressage involves riders directing their horses to perform a series of moves, including pirouettes, that are thought to have military origins.

This year the sport has been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Last week, a video emerged of a star rider whipping a horse repeatedly during training. For many dressage fans, the video was a shock. Dressage isn’t meant to be about forcing horses to perform; it should be a showcase for how riders and their steeds can come together. And despite requiring a huge amount of practice and strength, it’s meant to look effortless.

That’s especially true for the freestyle event, when the horses perform to music and are judged on artistic excellence as well as technical accuracy. The main dressage competitions began Tuesday, and that star musical turn is scheduled for Sunday.

The horse whipping scandal forced Charlotte Dujardin, a top rider on the British team, to withdraw. The team’s reserve rider, Becky Moody, will take her place. On a recent visit to her stables (before the whipping video became public), Moody explained what it takes to nurture and train an equine ballerina.

1. Find the right horse.

Some dressage riders try to buy success, offering millions of dollars for trained horses. But many, like Moody, breed their own horses, cross their fingers and hope they can turn a foal into a star.

Moody, 44, said she lucked out with Jagerbomb, her current horse. Bomb, as Moody affectionately calls him, is 10 years old, more than 5 1/2 feet tall and weighs about 1,600 pounds.

Some horses are naturally graceful. Others are clumsy. As a youngster, Bomb was in the middle, Moody said, so hardly a standout. He also appeared to lack the energy needed to perform dressage’s hardest moves.

It wasn’t until Jagerbomb was 6, Moody said, that things clicked. One day, he got excited and began prancing in place in a move known as the piaffe, which is like a horse’s version of the running man. Moody realized Bomb had a chance.

Now, he is in demand. This spring, another rider offered Moody more than 2 million pounds (about $2.5 million) for him. Moody declined.

2. Get strong.

Dressage is so intense, Moody said, she trains her horses only three or four times a week, for 40 minutes a time at most. To keep her horses strong and happy outside training sessions, Moody rides them along local roads, particularly up and down hills. Some of her horses also spend time on a treadmill fitted to the base of a water-filled box (pushing against the water provides an extra challenge).

A rider has to keep an eye on a horse’s mental state, too. Laura Tomlinson, another British rider, who won team gold and individual bronze at the 2012 Olympics, said that horses were a bit like children: If you overwork them, they get bored and won’t want to dance.

3. Repeat and reward.

Dressage training begins with the simplest moves: walking, trotting and cantering. A horse needs to do all three elegantly, Moody said, as well as be able to transition smoothly between the speeds.

Gradually, the rider will add more complex actions. They may start by walking the horse in a wide circle. Then, a smaller one. Those circles get tighter and tighter, with the horse’s hindquarters turned in, until the horse is effectively pirouetting.

Whatever move she is working on, Moody uses a “repeat and reward” technique. If the horse does something badly, she asks it to do the move again. If the horse performs well, she gives a reward: a “good boy” and a pat on the neck. (In a follow-up interview after the whipping video surfaced, she said it “shocked me, and it’s also made me really sad as it’s not even vaguely a reflection of what our sport is all about.”)

Eventually, Moody said, a horse and rider develop an almost secret language so that the rider simply has to make a tiny movement with her reins, calves, thigh or core, and the horse responds. Sounds can help too, but in competition, judges penalize riders who click their tongues or use other noises to instruct the horse.

4. Practice in front of a mirror.

At Moody’s indoor stable, a mirror about 65 feet long runs along one of the walls, making the arena resemble a dance studio.

Moody sometimes checks Jagerbomb’s form in the mirror, such as when working on the half pass, a move in which the horse travels forward and sideways at the same time, its legs crossing over each other. “You can think that you’re in an angle,” Moody said, “but you look in the mirror and realize you’re not — the body’s straight, and only his neck is bent.”

Mirrors aren’t for everyone. Moody said that David Hunt, one of her coaches, disapproves. “‘You should be able to feel it!’” he shouts.

5. Look pretty.

Dressage’s rules are complex; the official judging manual runs 68 pages. Judges don’t give marks for appearance, but Tomlinson said “judges are human” and are influenced by the horse and rider’s looks.

Moody had hair extensions woven into Jagerbomb’s tail to make it appear thicker and give it a more balanced appearance. “With a skinny tail he’d look a bit pathetic,” Moody said.

At competitions, she uses a needle and thread to braid Jagerbomb’s mane. It takes her 25 minutes, she said, time she uses to calm her mind and visualize the ride to come.

6. Set it to music.

During the freestyle event, riders and their horses perform six-minute routines in which they twirl and prance around the arena, while continually changing pace. Moody uses an app to design her floor plan, a map of her horse’s movements around the arena, and tries to showcase drama and difficulty.

She thinks about music only after she has choreographed a full routine. She sends ideas, along with a video of a run-through, to a composer, who then stitches together several songs or orchestral pieces to match the horse’s movements.

Tom Hunt, a composer who specializes in music for dressage, said that most riders want movie soundtracks, asking for soaring orchestral pieces from “Frozen” or “Indiana Jones.” Such easy listening means you won’t risk offending the judges, he added.

If Moody qualifies for the freestyle event, she will perform to something quirkier: a medley of Tom Jones hits. Moody said she initially worried that having Jagerbomb dancing to “Sex Bomb” would be “far too cheesy,” but the songs turned out to fit her horse’s crowd-pleasing personality.

Bomb himself rarely hears the music outside competitions. When Moody practices, she sometimes listens on headphones to check timings but is focused mainly on perfecting Bomb’s technique.

So, if he is happy to perform without music, is Jagerbomb actually dancing to Tom Jones? Or simply doing what Moody tells him, as songs blast from a stadium’s speakers? Patrick Moody, Becky’s father, said the horses aren’t ballerinas. They are responding to instructions. Dancing is merely “a convenient term for what they do,” he said.

For riders, though, the perspective is different. Tomlinson said she has ridden horses who have an instinctive sense of rhythm and move to the sound of any beat they hear.

For Becky Moody, there is no question about what Bomb is doing. Whenever he performs, she said, he does so with expression, fluidity and drama. “I’m teaching my horse to dance every time I ride it,” Moody said. Music “just adds that element that makes it dancing for everybody else.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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