We got an interesting comment to this video:
Hind legs under the centre of gravity will not produce a light energetic piaffe. Piaffe is the School trot in place. School trot is the basis of advanced level exercises. Piaffe is the preparation for the levade and School jumps. The distribution of weight between the two extremities of the horse is the key to establishing a balance allowing the horse to work easily with energy with least effort. Baucher defined this distribution of weight as an equal split, 50% in front 50% in the hindquarters. This was also the principle followed by Nuno Oliveira and of course his son João,for all breeds. Look at Nuno riding Soante in piaffe. The School trot, sometimes referred to as the Doux Passage, and rarely seen or understood now, look at Nuno riding Euclidies. The best example I’ve seen is Nuno riding a young Timor. Placing the hind legs under the centre of gravity, roughly corresponding to a place a little forward of and beneath the riders seat immediately places more than 50% weight on the hindlegs, destroying all lightness by placing a greater demand on the horse. This is not Art which requires the rider to conserve his horse’s energy to the least effort for the best performance of an exercise. Maintaining this 50/50 distribution of weight in the piaffe is critical to developing the maximum flexibility of the 4 principle joints , fetlock, hock, stifle and hip which will be used in the levade and school jumps. The engagement ( flexing or bending)of these joints causes a slight lowering and rounding of the croup giving the illusion that the hind legs have moved forward more under the horse. If this illusion becomes reality then the piaffe is not correct and not a good preparation for the advanced exercises because it is destroying the harmony that must exist between the forehand and hindquarters. Nigel Butt
Here Rupert’s response
Yes…and..no… and yes and no again -.the spirit of inquiry is a beautiful thing if pursued with kindness and a collegial, collaborative energy.
Truth is there is no hard and fast way with the piaffe because there are so many types of horse and different writers and trainers of different ages tended to talk about the type of horse they preferred and which was prevalent at their time – Oliveira points this out and so recommends three main approaches to piaffe which I’ll go into briefly here.
But he stresses that all three require a horse to know shoulder in and renvers in walk as a prerequisite because otherwise they can’t collect softly.
In some of his writings, Oliveira describes piaffe as a kind of walk and in others as a kind of passage in place depending on the horse’s type and temperament. This appears as a contradiction, but really, it’s about context. Oliveira started his career as an ardent, even fanatic baucherist, then saw the limitations and danger of this extremism and went back to a mix of La Gueriniere and Marialva with with sime Steinbrecht and Baucher thrown in depending on the type of horse (vids on this in out playlist)
While it is true that a fully developed piaffe jumping from diagonal to diagonal is the apex of what a piaffe can be (effectively passage in place as you rightly say). oliveira points out that only a few horses will achieve this and that it’s only one form of the various forms of piaffe – diff types of horse produce different piaffes. We do indeed teach that kind of horse a piaffe from this method of school trot but it still starts in walk with shoulder in and renvers a La La Gueriniere until these ‘airs’ can be done in a soft and elevated (school) trot, and then we.go to Oliverias first method for piaffe where he recommends using steinbrechts method of using halts and then departures back to the school trot and then halt until the horse “falls into the piaffe” – this can be done in long reins or in hand or with a rider and we can make a vid on that (watch this space). The danger of doing it from the saddle is that the horse can over fizz, so from the ground first tends to work best
But it’s only one way, designed for a certain very energetic type of horse – a specialisation or niche if you will.
Oliveira then points the majority of horses will need to perform a smaller, less elevated piaffe- he sometimes recommends the above method for them but also from La Gueriniere’s tried and true method of shoulder in to renvers starting in walk then adding soft elevated (school) trot then piaffe (we have more then one vid of this on our playlist for reference).
Again, this is just one way, but it tends to be a reliable go-to for most modern lighter breeds.
Finally there is a 17th century way elucidated by Cavendish and de la Brue that uses a ‘circle’ (in fact a type of mild shoulder in/shoulder fore/leg yieldy thing in the circle) starting in walk then to a doux (gentle) trot – again we’ve got a vid in our playlist but it’s designed for a very baroque type.of horse.
And then there are other ways, too. Such as walk to a tickle on the crouo then walk again, which often works well for cold.blood types. We are slowly trying to make as many vids as possible of the different ways to piaffe.
Regarding the 50 50 weight distribution that Baucher talks of its worth noting that he was working mostly with thoroughbreds and Anglo Arabs who come very much on the shoulders by nature but again it’s- as Oliveira guides us – a matter of shoulder in to renvers or travers which will get the hind legs under enough for the weight redistribution (which again will in reality vary a bit horse by horse).
Baucher in fact often used another way to piaffe that involved no kind of trot at all – the mountain goat pose followed by a backwards and forwards ‘swing’ in walk which produced him a high, slow piaffe.
The best text I know of (there may be others) that puts all these different approaches into context and irons out the apparent contradictions is Dom Diego Braganca’s book on Dressage in the French/Portuguese style (Xenophon Press).
But of course.all this is simply based on my learning with masters such as Luis Valenca and having taught some numbers of horses and people the piaffer, etc, over the past couple of decades, so I am.always open to learning more and going deeper. Especially when it’s done on a spirit of kindness for both the monkey and the pony.
