Monday, October 7, 2013

How do you say "yee haw" in German? The Landgestuet Warendorf stallion parade is the most fun stallion show I've ever seen.
The first act was a jumping quadrille where the horse and rider combinations jump in and out of the arena. They proceed to perform over a series of brush jumps, weaving through each other at high speed. The stallions were pretty keyed up  and fed off the crowd energy. Some of the riders had their hands full.
The State Stud Warendorf has a German Coldblood breeding program in addition to the warmbloods. These charming and docile work horses are beloved by locals and are a fun part of the parade. They have one event where they bring out five abreast, hooked together by their bits, with a handler on each end horse, and a brave whip person out in front of them. When they turn the group one of the end-men basically acts as an anchor they pivot around him. Really funny.
A super quadrille is called "warm and cold," where they alternate a warmblood and its rider with a coldblood driven in a stud cart. They do an elaborate quadrille (in the US, we'd call this a drill team) and it's quite thrilling to see the carts and ridden horses weaving in and out of each other with precision.
Exhibition of the current Bundeschampions from Warendorf was popular with the crowd. Being a state stud (landgestuet), i.e. taxpayer funded, these parades are also a way of showing the public what they are paying for. There are ten landgestuets within Germany and each has regularly scheduled stallion parades for the patrons.
There was a demonstration of high school movements like the Spanish walk, the levade, in which the horse stands poised on its hind legs, and the capriole where the horse leaps into the air and kicks out behind. These maneuvers are performed by the Lippizaners of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, but it's unusual to see them done elsewhere. The capriole and levade movements were developed for warfare.
The Landgestuet Warendorf also houses the German Riding School where students are accepted from all over the world to live onsite and learn all phases of horse care and training.

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