(“I want to do passage someday!”)
The scourge of every purist is a horse that does “the tricks” without the underpinning of a correct foundation. Karma, having a sense of humor, often comes back to bite those riders who take shortcuts.
I taught a woman with an FEI schoolmaster who, following a clinician’s advice, warmed up her horse with half steps in order to, as she explained, “teach him to be more engaged.” It was not unusual, despite my warnings, to find her horse standing on the track as I arrived, bumping his butt up and down while barely lifting his feet out of the sand. And when she’d ask him to move forward, he WOULDN’T. Can you say “Behind the Leg”? Can you say “Massively inappropriate unless her aim was to teach him to disregard the aids”? An exercise suggested with good intentions but applied so monumentally wrong does great harm and little good!
I met another rider schooling GP whose horse seemed confused and panicky in the very collected work. He would lose the rhythm in both piaffe and passage, sway from side to side, and offer assorted strides of an unrecognizable gait instead of a clear two beat.
Cut to the other end of the spectrum, both literally and figuratively. Rider with a horse only nominally on the aids—casual response to the leg, flat-ish topline, stiff jaw—wants to work on trot lengthening. “And I want to work on dunking the ball and scoring like Wilt,” I’m thinking to myself.
The overwhelming absurdity of her request clearly eluded this rider. Mediums aren’t a trick. Passage is not a trick. They’re both trots on a long continuum of trots from maximum extension at one extreme to maximum collection at the other. But they are ALL trot. The length versus the amplitude of the steps may vary, but all the qualities that make them viable—the rhythm, suppleness, flexibility, acceptance, and honest real-time reaction to the leg must be present throughout.
Looking at the continuum, specific spots along it are the trots we choose to show the judge, but many times a resistance or misunderstanding can be rectified by sliding “the bead” a little farther left or right. Let the piaffe, for instance, creep a little more forward to enhance its purity and then gradually milk it back towards being more on the spot. Even if a particular spot along the continuum isn’t the actual version of trot which you’ll offer in the show ring, it can be a steppingstone to one without some particular nagging flaw.
I was explaining this concept to a novice eventor, saying she may never actually have to deal with the passage end of the scale but that the principle applied to her as she tried to develop her horse’s lengthening.
Her eyes downcast, she replied, “Oh, but I want to do passage someday!”
“OK,” I replied, “but . . . .”
“Because,” she interrupted, “I need to impress my husband. He doesn’t think very much of the dressage I do with all these circles, but he’d really have something to brag about if his wife could do passage!”
All well and good, but if you do it, you better do it right! In dressage and in life, as the angels would tell you, “With every wish, there comes a curse.”