Equine Extravaganza

Chalk up one more of the things brethren never do. I went to a sort of circus on Saturday. I don't know that such a thing has ever occurred to me before.

I say "sort of" circus; it was a horse-based affair, and I was expecting stunning trickery on horseback in a big top. And I was partly right. But in any case, it was obviously pure entertainment, with no moral value, and as such is something that's only newly OK in my life. I can't imagine what harm anyone would see in such a thing, really, except that you are sharing that entertainment with a large crowd, and it could hardly be called essential to life, watching people ride horses cleverly.

Actually, it was less a show and more a drama. I couldn't help feeling that it would have been better if they hadn't tried to force a structure onto what they did, particularly as the structure frequently collapsed under the strain. There were as many human dancers as horses, including a ballerina, which was not unwelcome but not what I was expecting, and a kind of multiple story.

It started as a bit of Greek mythology, in which a fallen muse (the ballerina) seeks Pegasus so as to regain ... something or other I didn't quite follow, but it was very important. Meanwhile an evil spirit tries to get in first. The ballerina needed to understand the mind and spirit of "the horse" before she could find Pegasus, and that justified, dramatically, people making their horses dance and do tricks. Which they proceeded to do. I'm no horse person, so I probably wasn't as impressed as I could have been, but I could see how well it was done while having some grasp of how difficult it was.

It was a bit harder to see how the mythical story justified Spanish dancing with horses, and a Dad's Army WWII interlude with a comic horse the size of a large dog, but, hey, it's all part of the show.

I was also keen on some of the costuming: Pegasus was impressive, and the evil spirit was great, a dragon supported by three people and constructed from deliberately tatty black fabric so that it looked only partly there, with a mouth that swung open and closed in time to the thumping music. Combined with a smoke machine and plenty of coloured spotlights, it worked very well.

And we did get the tricksy horseriders after the interval. Mongolians, apparently, who swung dizzyingly in and out of their saddles at the gallop, sometimes backwards or underneath the horse, sometimes two to one horse and other times one person standing on two horses. In one case, all the other horses galloped under one of the rider's legs while he straddled a pair of them. So I didn't feel short-changed. The drama was fun, but it would have been disappointing if that had been all.

I'm struggling to think of a brethren connection here to justify writing about this, but who cares. I can't even get too interested in why it would be so wrong for them to attend such an event.