Following on from essays for the Paris Review Daily about Selika Lazevski (here, with research notes here) and Sarah l’Africaine (here, with research notes here), I’ve written a third essay about my obsession with the horsewomen of the nineteenth-century Parisian circus who “lived at the center of public attention while simultaneously being marginal”. You can …
Category Archives: Haut Ecole
Everything I Don’t Know About Selika Lazevski
UPDATE: The viral photographs of Sélika set me hunting through archives and circuses from St Petersburg to Paris to uncover the lives of elusive women who were celebrated artistes, survivors, and scapegoats of the nineteenth century. I’m telling their stories now in Amazons of Paris. You can sign up here for more information and …
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Rapunzel Horses – the hot accessory of Early Modern Europe?
I’ve been reading beautifully illustrated books about horses all my life and in the last twelve years I’ve trawled all sorts of academic articles and image libraries, so it’s always delightful to find an image I’ve never seen before. The Palazzo Pitti in Florence just opened an exhibit called Leopoldo de’ Medici: Prince of the …
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May 2017 Bring You Obedient White Horses
Therese Renz of the famous Renz circus dynasty, c. 1895. I’ve seen wonderful pictures of her in action (have you see the one where she and her horse are jumping rope?) but didn’t realise that she was a Berliner, and is buried just up the road from me in St Hedwig’s cemetery in Weissensee. She …
Haunted by Horses in St Petersburg
Last weekend I travelled to St Petersburg to start research on a new book and I thought I’d share my equestrian shots. I was only in this fascinating, complicated city for two and a half days and did not venture out of the very heart of it but I still found some horse history of …
Post-Olympic Thoughts and the War of Hyperflexion vs. Harmony
Have you recovered from the emotional rollercoaster of the Olympics? I think I nearly have. If you’ve read this blog before, you’ll know that my dressage experience is nugatory. It’s not something I did as a child and I certainly wasn’t interested in watching it beyond the first phase of the three-day event. Boring! But …
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North vs. South in Dressage?
Can you imagine trying to rollkur the neck on that horse? I can’t… This combo scored 71.520 in the first test at Greenwich, below Mr Kittel and Scandic, who got 74.073.
Bring on the Dancing Horses
And from a pas de cheval to a ballet à cheval: this is music composed and performed for a grand pageant to celebrate the marriage of King Louis XIII of France to Anne of Austria in 1615. At 5.33 is, I think, music composed for the first formal “ballet à cheval” – the predecessor to …
Spotted Horses All Got Up in Feathers
So excited to be attending the performance of an equestrian “carousel” last performed for Frederick the Great! Come for the silly hats, folks, and stay for the spectacle of some serious haute école. There are still some tickets!
Fair Girls on Grey Horses
Fantastic news via Fran Jurga’s Equus blog: Hannah Zeitlhofer, one of the two first women to be admitted to the Spanish Riding School of Vienna (video from 2008), qualified as an “Bereiteran’wärterin” on the 1st May. This means she can now take part in the famous school’s public displays. British-American rider Sojourner Morrell dropped out …