A new article, by Paul Belalsik, about dressage and the military. Why does this linking of dressage to the military and military movements persist, and to this day sometimes overpower the well-documented artistic evolution of dressage?...The provenance of dressage being guided by artistic forces is overwhelming.
Judging from my mailbox, dressage riders seemed perplexed about how competition judges are currently evaluating some horses’ piaffes at the international level. What is high quality and what is faulty? In this article, I will address two major faults in piaffes of popular riders that have appeared in recent performances, and seem to be confusing viewers.

 

In every dressage competition test, at every level, in every country, the horse and rider will start and finish the test with a halt. The beginning of the test may read, “A: Enter working trot. X: Halt, Salute. Proceed collected trot.”

In an article recently published by the Royal Veterinary College, University of London, a question is framed in bold type: “Should we redefine equine lameness in the era of quantitative gait analysis?” The article begins, “An international team of researchers, including [some] from the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) in London, have strongly advised on the need to discriminate clearly between “asymmetry” and “lameness” when assessing a horse’s gait.”