Break Your Own Pony

This is a Performance lecture on strong thighs and shovelling shit or spoilt children demanding that Daddy buys them a pony or the wind blowing through your hair as you ride your tamed Stallion or My Little Pony or judges, rosettes or country life, whips and gyrating or saying she’s a bit ‘Horsey’.

We had never ridden before. We decided to go on a Riding Holiday for a week in Wales as our annual residency. This was to be research and the starting point for new work. We wanted to be part of a challenging physical activity that removed us from the familiar, introducing and immersing ourselves in a new language of both movement and words.

Why horse riding? We like the associations that Horse riding has. The clichéd well-to-do ladies or Pony Club and Polo’s or the smell of wet leather or Jackie magazine or strong thighs and shovelling shit or spoilt children demanding that Daddy buys them a pony or the wind blowing through your hair as you ride your tamed Stallion or My Little Pony or judges, rosettes and tight hair or country life, whips and gyrating or saying she’s a bit ‘Horsey’.

We give a ‘performance lecture’ on horse riding with spoken word, jodhpurs, re-enactments, the rules and reactions, whoa, whoa steady. We use slide projections and props and will be both poetic at times and very physical at times, sometimes at the same time but ultimately we develop our love of the embarrassing, pushing ourselves within the new performance to be our most ridiculous yet.

We do not mention horses once.