Ingrid Schatz and Pony Photo: Jeffrey Anderson
HORSE
With him
here, now
skin to skin
warmth spilling
one into the other.
breaths
a lattice of
drawing in,
drawing out.
the heart is a
cave that holds our
boisterous blood
our twinned pulses
bound in this moment
after all, the only and
most precious.
Paula Josa-Jones
I went to see the film War Horse last night. In a blog following the horse slaughter debacle, I had expressed a hope that millions would see the movie and be moved to act on behalf of the horse. Sadly, I don’t think this movie will do it.
I had seen the play several months ago. There is something infinitely more moving about the relationship of horse to human in the theatrical production. Not just the relationships between the human actors and the horses, but also the breathing animation of human bodies inside the horses, creating each of the subtle equine articulations of these marvelous puppets. The horses feel more fully there because of the intricate, detailed attention to how they move, breath, respond.
And the play does more to engage us in the horror of this war that took the lives of 8 million horses and 35 million humans.
The horses in the film are beautiful, no question. But there is something stomach turning about seeing a real horse run though “no man’s land” becoming hideously entangled in barbed wire. Here I would have to agree with Kat Murphy:
Maybe the puppets used in the Broadway play eloquently expressed the horror of beautiful, dumb beasts brutally done to death, even more expendable than the millions of young men wasted in WWI. And perhaps a puppet Joey racing across no-man’s-land, mad with terror, to fall tangled in barbed wire worked as shattering metaphor for the nightmare of war. But movies can be cruelly literal; it’s living horseflesh we see beaten, maimed, dying in Spielberg’s endless outtake from “All Quiet on the Western Front.” There’s no masking the smell of slaughterhouse.
But hey, in the very next scene after Joey’s gut-wrenching steeplechase, enemy soldiers join forces to cut him out of the barbed wire, cracking wise and milking the moment, as hushed as church, for every drop of schmaltz — served up on Joey’s bloody back. Trust corn to take away the sting. That corn, followed by a prolonged, self-indulgent descent into bathos, turns the suffering of an animal into a cinematic lie (the exact opposite of the sanctification of the battered donkey in Robert Bresson‘s “Au hasard, Balthazar“). That lie feels like the callousness of a child, unable to grasp what pain and death mean to other living things.
The difference for me is between feeling manipulated versus awed and moved.
This morning when I was grooming Nelson, he rested his head on my shoulder and I could feel his soft breath on my cheek. We stood like that for almost a minute in the cold January sun.
I have been working with Nelson on going away and coming back. On being able to respond to hand signals to ask him to walk around me in a circle, change directions and then come back to me, turning toward me.
This may sound like no big deal, but it is. He is saying “OK, I feel safe to come back to you.” What I especially appreciate is that he is calm throughout. Even when I asked him to move off more briskly (not on this clip), he was still not anxious. How I can tell is that he settles immediately on a subtle hand signal. He is more interested in reading my movement than getting upset. (I was not able to be so clear with my signals because of holding the camera.)
This is a yoga: opening to more movement, more awareness, more attunement – one breath, one day at a time. Laying down a path of trust and communication, in what feels like little improvisational dance phrases.
Did I mention that I love this horse?
Yesterday I went to work with Nelson. There is The Work, but the other part is that I go to Nelson because being with him is an immediate way to get happy and move into focus.
There had been snow so things were different. Nelson was spookier than he has been for a long time. The snow was falling off the trees onto the hood of my car making this random timpani sound which he found alarming (so did I). For both of us the light was refracting differently, and the footing was sloppy and icy. He allowed me to take the giant snow balls off his feet, and then we went to work.
I have been developing the work on Nelson’s left – the dark side – asking him to move on cue onto a circle going left so that his dark side is the one facing me. When he circles to the right, his body is a smooth curve, and he moves comfortably – either close in to me or farther out, depending on how I have asked. When he goes left, his body is straight as a plank, he doesn’t want to look at me and he is markedly more tense. It is as if the cannot feel himself on that side.
The BLM freeze brands the captured Mustangs on the left side of their neck. Given Nelson’s terror and ferocity at that time, I am sure that event was traumatic and violent at least. Maybe that is why the dark side is so persistently dark.
The lovely thing was that after we practiced his a few times, he got quieter and calmer. Not exactly soft, but I could see that coming. That was when I hit a patch of slippery slush and made a shockingly disorganized predator movement. Arms flung up for balance. He took off. After a few moments, he came back and we went on. That is the very beautiful part of developing a long relationship with a horse. There is a foundation of trust, a language of ask and answer that let’s us slide seamlessly back into the work and the relationship.
Here are some of the things I have learned from Nelson. These are lessons that spill into my writing, my choreography, my mothering.
The last one is probably the most important. There is nothing like stopping to take in the sun, the trees, the hills while standing next to a creature that is choosing to be there, to be next to you in that breathing moment. Today my stallion Capprichio put his nose on my neck and stood like that, just breathing for about two minutes. Bliss.
postscript: I am teaching an online class called Breaking into Blossom: Moving into an Improvisational Life starting on January 23. If you register before December 23, the price is $75. On Christmas Eve Day it goes up to $100.