trainer’s point of view
Insights from Laura Amandis: ONE SMALL STEP AT A TIME By Mary Daniels
I
n the winter of 2009, Laura Amandis took her 15-year-old Andalusian stallion Acierto to the Museum of
Contemporary Art in downtown Chicago. He was to play a role onstage, as Emperor Napoleon’s charger, in a comedic opera in Spanish by a Mexican theater company: Monstruos y Protegidos, (Monsters and Proteges). (The play, in case readers are curious, had nothing to do with horses per se but was about Napoleon’s fight to do away with the practice of castrating young male singers so that their voices would not change with puberty. At one point Napoleon sits on Acierto onstage.) Even though Acierto has done thousands of exhibitions with Laura all over the U.S. and Canada, including Equine Affaire’s “Pfizer Fantasia,” the Midwest Horse, the Kentucky Horse Park and the Georgia Renaissance Fair’s “The Horse of Kings,” still, this was a high-risk situation few other horse trainers would dare. “Picture the horse going up a few floors in the freight
elevator of the theater, as cramped as a space can appear to be to a horse, being led on stage, left there to perform at liberty while I am sitting in the orchestra pit with another accomplished trainer directing the horse on stage. Imagine spotlights popping everywhere, music starting to fill the place and people rising out of their seats applauding! It is then that one really feels in one’s heart what it means to have a bond with a horse,” says Laura. Giving us some insights on what it is like to work a horse in such unique situations, she says, “Achieving such a bond is an art, and not every horse is capable of this level of it. Working with horses has to be a passion more than anything. When one is passionate about working with these noble creatures there can be nothing standing in the way of developing a deep bond with the horse. It really is more of an art than a science, but one can get to the point of communicating with a horse on a cerebral level. Then and only then does it become almost effortless, no battle of wills, no tests of strength, just being in the moment with the horse.” Acierto and Laura can be seen performing online on
64 September/October 2010
YouTube—they are a popular dressage-at-liberty act with the stallion executing piaffe, passage, and other movements, including lateral ones, combined with such high school movements as the Spanish walk and the rear, all to her subtle cues. The result is an amazing dance between human and equine. She also exhibits him under saddle, sometimes riding him in La Garocha, the Spanish cowboy technique where the horse moves around the pole, a discipline which is now being promoted by the
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76