(“Movements seemed to be performed like you’d read a grocery list.”)

Here is a news flash from a certified Oldster: everything wasn’t better back in the day. Sure, Sid Caesar would crush Jimmy Kimmel and John Ford would put Quentin Tarantino to shame. But do you know how simpleminded the AHSA dressage tests were back when?
There were only two tests at each level. Movements seemed to be performed like you’d read a grocery list—one of these, then one of those . . . A trot lengthening was always at the end and right after a transition down from canter (presumably to be done before the horse lost his momentum). And, of course, there were no stretching circles, uberstreichen, or steps of “very collected” canter.

In the early ’80s at the National Instructors Seminar we were introduced to “radical schooling patterns”—like shoulder-in to renvers or medium to collected to medium trot or leg yielding to a canter depart. These and many more are now common in the tests.

One minor downside to these generally laudable innovations is that it’s much harder now to create a freestyle that’s not “test-like. “Other than some quarter line stuff, almost every movement you can think of has been in one test or another by now! That in turn puts a premium on another kind of creativity—a bar which is less often surmounted. Good freestyles are not just about fancy patterns. As judges we reward the horses which “dance” to the music, changing figures as the tune suggests and matching the paces to its dynamics. Once the clichés have been used up, there’s nowhere to go but where no one has gone before.