The Horses

The Horses

   

Photo copied from Odysseo program

The other night was a night to splurge, something that we seemingly all do now and then.  We bite the bullet and make the decision to have a nice dinner out at an expensive restaurant (not us) or buy something we had looked at for ages but couldn't afford (not us either).  Last night it was a night for horses.  The circus was in town, actually, the Cirque de Soleil was in town, their newest production through Cavalia and titled Odysseo.  Now I am not really a horse person, that is, I truly know little about horses other than admiring their size and their muscular structure;  to be honest, I've only ridden on a horse once or twice and both times were more of a gimmick thing, a paid stable ride and something far from the wild westerns where horses run all out and kick dust in the faces of people as the rider jumps off at the saloon (well, that was my childhood version of them, anyway).  But my wife loves, and by this I mean loves, horses.  It's a passion, an immediate melting of her person as she encounters such an animal...and here was a chance to see them up close, quite honestly just an arm's length away, the large animals charging by so closely that you could feel their wind and their power and their breathing as they galloped by.

Note the projected image in back, always changing.

     They pronounce it (Odysseo) in four syllables in case you were wondering, an interesting perspective coming from my language background which would link it more to the word "odyssey" than it's actual Spanish leaning (many of the horses used were Spanish purebreds coming from Portugal and other areas).  The show was a spectacle, a word saved for few occasions, the horses all in their prime or seeming to be so (they actually average ten years in age, although some are now fourteen) and the performers making it all look so easy as the horses (often riderless) gathered in circles or turned this way and that, all in unison.  But while my wife marveled at the beauty of the animals (something that I did as well, but without the same education and love of the animals to truly appreciate what she was seeing), I was gazing at the creativity and the engineering of the production.  Imagine just some of the details to just pull this show off (this all taken from their program):  a background projection screen 3x the size of a traditional theater screen and displaying the images of 18 synchronized projectors and 200 computerized lights; a center ring and grid that weighs 70 tons (all of the show is done under a big top state of the art tent 125 feet high); 6,000 tons of dirt and stone and 40,000 gallons of water to create the stage; 600 human meals daily, and for the horses, 15,000 bales of hay, 70,000+ pounds of grain and 1,750 pounds of carrots over the course of a year (throw in the 9 showers made just for washing the horses before the show); all of this assembled and later taken down after a few weeks to be moved to another city with the help of 120 large transport trucks.  How does one pull this off?

     Be it a song or a play or a production (even a company or a government), making the leap from small to large to spectacular is an assembly of detail and working out the kinks...sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.  The logistics of it all --from the training to the rehearsals-- have to somehow come together enough to prove rewarding.  Then there is the opposite end, a single person having the patience or the courage to help save unwanted horses or to film them in the wild.  Locally, one woman has devoted her life to saving injured or aged or rescued horses, opening her Noble Horse Sanctuary and always struggling to find enough funding just for feed and to get new straw for the stalls; another young man, D.B. Young, has made it his mission to film the beauty of wild mustangs and other horses (most also destined for rounding up and later slaughter if not adopted), our government's acquiescing to the demands of ranchers competing for the land (too many horses, is the claim).  His patience (sometimes all day to capture just one photo) shows the beauty of the wild.  Both of these people are a far cry from the expertly staged and choreographed "show" of a Cirque de Soleil, but they are equal in their beauty.  So is the award-winning writing of William Nack on a horse named Secretariat.

    We once knew a friend who was truly a horse "whisperer," those rare folk who seem to speak or communicate in a different, almost animal language.  When I asked her what she heard, she told me that it wasn't as if the horses spoke to her in a language, but rather conveyed what they were feeling; she could barely pick out what a dog was "saying," (in one case, a chained dog barking caused her to constantly hear the dog's desperate cries of "help me") but the horses were very clear.  One rancher brushed all of this off as she approached one of his horses during a ride, that is until she casually walked up to his horse as she and the rancher rested, rubbed the horse's snout and turned to the rancher telling him that his horse had earlier gotten tangled in the barbed wire fencing there some years ago...something that frightened the horse terribly.  Watching the show, I was struck by the creativity, and realized that such creativity can come in many forms.  Yes, the show was terrific (and expensive), the communication between human and animal wildly on display, especially later as the animals' manes were braided and they were fed and brushed down.  But who's to say that in the wild such care and loving isn't also displayed or also possible?  The force of the horse just walking past me then jumping to a full gallop was a display of power in an animal, but a controlled and almost pampered animal.  Out in the desert of our state, such animals still run free, at least until distant helicopters appear and try to corral some of them to make room for the grazing cattle.  Would their beauty and display of power be any less dazzling?

    Perhaps the real purpose of a show such Odysseo, complete with elaborate costumes (340) and gymnastic-style acrobatics, is to return us to our childhoods, to burn into our minds that dust-kicking, saloon-arriving image...to picture ourselves riding that horse and feeling that surge of speed and sudden stopping.  For me, once the show was complete I walked away with a different feeling...thrilled as a child, of course, but also full of wonderment.  Could communication between humans and animals reach a point where we could "feel" each others thoughts, where we could each become "whisperers"?  It wouldn't always be good, but a lot of good might come from it.