The severity of competition dressage

A dissonance was making itself felt between my childhood dream and what I was seeing on the competition grounds: the judges were waiting for what was expected.

I could not feel the horses' personalities expressing themselves.

The riders' work brought out technical feats codified to the extreme.

It seemed to me that technique was becoming a quest in itself, and that this technical quest aimed at an efficiency that turned pairs into mere performers of a set task. The expected movements formed a structure that set limits on expressiveness by tracing the outlines of the "perfect" form.

To that extent, the dressage I was watching constituted a hindrance to the free play of imagination and of movement, which the shape of the movement had to fit.

At every test that unfolded, all I could see on the riders' faces was concentration.

At the edge of the dressage arenas, nothing drew me in, nothing seemed to speak to me, and I felt a stranger.

Becoming aware of this hindrance to the free expression of horses was the breaking point of my adherence to academic methods, and the starting point for the reassessment of my own quest.