Princess Nathalie – Teaching in Australia – Working with Gitte Donvig
Words Chris Hector, pix Ros Neave
You were telling Gitte, don’t get too elegant, don’t sit too straight…
There is positive tension in your body when you sit straight, and you can over-do it. You can sit straight, but you can still be relaxed, and Gitte wants to sit straight with all her heart, which is not wrong, it just makes a little too much tension – it is a bit over the top, and she then stops the flow going through the horse’s body, through her body, into the hand and then the rein.”
“That’s something that Klaus (Balkenhol) always said, try just to sit like a potato and go da-dum, da-dum, on the horse’s back in the passage. And often it helps. You still have the positive tension of sitting straight but you are not straining with all your heart to sit straight, now passage, and keep a light contact. You can only keep a light, soft contact and play with the reins, when you are also relaxed in your body.”
Why is it so simple and so hard at the same time?
Nathalie laughs. “If it would be easy, everybody would do it… it also has a lot to do with having control of your body. You have to know which part you can let go of, which part you have to keep on holding, but still being able to sit straight.
A lot of it is reading your own body – and that is the most difficult part to explain. There are people who have a lot of feeling with their body, and there are others who don’t really have a lot of feeling for their own body, and those are the ones who make it really difficult to explain how things should feel.”
Kyra – “she had to unmuddle me and show me the right way”.
Are you an instinctive rider or a learned rider?
“There were a lot of things I had to learn, but I had a lot of feeling for horses, or for animals in general. I had to go through a learning process and when I came to Kyra (Kyrklund), there were things that I had learned that were wrong, which she had to un-muddle and show me the right way.”
What would you be doing with Gitte?
“I think she has to learn the feeling of sitting straight but in a positive way, without too much tension in her body. She is a lovely rider, she doesn’t have to use all her strength to keep straight, she can start to relax and get comfortable and go more with the horse.”
And less whip and more leg?
“Especially in piaffe and passage. When I teach horses to do these movements, and also with the older ones, I very seldom have a whip. With the young ones I might have it because you can have three nice steps then they lose it, and just to get over that, I will have a whip with me – but they have to learn to do piaffe / passage without a whip. Once you teach them with the whip, when you take the whip away, they go all flat. They have to know that when you come with the leg, the only reaction, is to react. They have to react to the leg first.”
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