Tag Archives: herd

Jan14

the herd

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I went to see Nelson, and toward the end of our time together, my friend came down to say hello.  As she and I stood outside his paddock, he hung out with us, nuzzling the fence, poking his nose through – participating in our conversation.

Nelson is a lonely stallion.  He does not get to hang out with a herd.  In captivity, we usually isolate stallions because they can hurt each other.  We don’t want them to work out their territorial, sexual stuff on our watch.  So for the time being, we humans are his herd.

I have been thinking about why I am so much more comfortable with an equine herd or a dog pack than I am with most human herds.  Maybe it is because I feel so clearly the lack of agenda or concealed intent with the horses and dogs.  Maybe it is that as a dancer, movement and touch are my first language, and that is where the horses live.  Language is not weaponized, and the communication feels more honest.

It is not always simple.  I sometimes have to spend a lot of time parsing what my Andalusian gelding Amadeo is saying.  He is a flighty boy, and like some humans, his language (a hoof, his teeth) sometimes fly out before he has really thought things through.  Nelson is more straightforward, more willing to tell it like it is.

I am also thinking about what is essential to me in a day.  What I come up with first is four legs and a soft nose.

What about you?

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Dec3

pony dances

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Escorial from Paula Josa-Jones on Vimeo.

For those of you who have not visited the RIDE site, here is a bit of what we call horse dancing. What I want to call attention to is the attunement, the listening, and the conversation between bodies. That is what has always been important to me about this work.

Escorial (aka Pony, and yes, he has his own page) is the equine performer. He is trained as a liberty horse (no restraint) by the brilliant Sarah Hollis of Tintagel Andalusians.We have worked with Pony and Sarah for nearly five years.  I think of it as the yoga of the herd.  Learning how subtle a signal is required to create a profound shift in Pony’s movement.  Rehearsals are humbling, because despite our  dancerly skills, our ability to communicate in herd-speak is always in need of improvement.  Sarah, being the alpha mare, keeps all of us in line.

Why this might be important to non-horse people: Since 87% of our communication is non-verbal, figuring out what we are communicating with our movement seems like a good idea.

For example, my horse Amadeo is majorly spooky. For a long time, I thought he might be autistic because his reactions seemed so disproportionate to what was happening around him. My godson is autistic, and I have had a similar difficulty in decoding his responses. What I finally understood is that Amadeo’a responses were precisely calibrated to his perception of the situation because he is hyper-aware of movement and the underlying emotional landscape. And in order to be around him, I had to become hyper-aware too, but not tense, not nervous. That is a very nuanced and subtle dance, requiring some deep inner and outer listening. And that is horse dancing.

When and with whom are you horse dancing?