A Horse Ballet Rears Up

It’s a hot afternoon in late May, and four dressage riders are rehearsing the first paces of a French equestrian ballet, “Le Ballet a Cheval,” which has not been seen since Maria de Medici commissioned it in 1612 for the engagement of her son, King Louis XIII, to Anne of Austria, Princess of Spain.

Entering with a measured gait to tinny, recorded music, the riders approach center field, split off into diagonals and come to rest in the four corners of the outdoor arena. From there two of them trot toward the center again, segueing into a piaffe (horses trotting in place) and stopping alongside each other so that they can bow and exchange a ceremonial handshake.

The ballet, choreographed by Antoine de Pluvinel, who ran France’s first state-run military academy and was Louis XIII’s riding teacher, is the high point of “Le Carrousel du Roi,” an elaborate 17th century pageant and entertainment that will be performed Friday and Saturday at Walnut Creek’s Heather Farms Park. It is part of the biennial early-music gathering known as the Berkeley Festival & Exhibition.

On this afternoon, the riders look more dusty than regal. But in less than three weeks these baseball-capped and T-shirted performers will go through their maneuvers, gowned and coiffed in brocades, wigs and plumed helmets imported from Belgium. They’ll have taken on the identities of such illustrious Arthurian heroes as Valdante the Faithful, Riveglose the Dangerous and Alberin the Courteous. In June the recorded score will also be replaced by the Renaissance instruments of the Festival of Winds Ensemble (directed by Richard Cheetham) whose musicians play such delectables as shawms, sackbuts, trumpets, percussion and a bagpipe. They’ll be joined by a master of ceremonies and a singer--on a pony.

The person responsible for putting plumes on riders and costumes on horses and setting them off in intricate “dances” is Kate van Orden, a UC Berkeley musicologist. She became interested in Pluvinel’s work when she was researching French music and its relationships to concepts of military virtue. It was under Pluvinel that preparing for individual combat, which long had been the basis for military horsemanship, gave way to training for groups of horses and riders, favoring the speed and mobility required for what was to become the modern cavalry.

Van Orden’s research turned up detailed choreography notes for Pluvinel’s horse ballet, along with eyewitness descriptions and the ballet’s score--a rare triple in such scholarship.

“Usually, what happens is that you get descriptions of how wonderful the event was and how good everyone looked. About the music, nothing,” she explains. “For this ballet we have the exact music; it was written by Robert Ballard, who was a lutenist and also the royal printer of music. That’s probably why we have the music, and now can match it to the choreography.”

And that’s one element that made “Le Carrousel” ripe for revival. However, when Van Orden approached Robert Cole, director of Cal Performances and the founder of the Berkeley Festival, he was skeptical.

“I needed to take a hard look at something that, after all, hadn’t been performed since 1612,” he recalls. “But the more I learned about it, the more I became convinced that this is the kind of unique event which is in line with what we are trying to do with the festival.” So he gave his go-ahead, and Van Orden went after horses and riders.

She encountered them just across the hills from Berkeley in Contra Costa County’s horse country: Creeky Routson, a United States Dressage Federation silver and bronze medalist, and singer-songwriter and dressage trainer Teresa Trull. Trull and Routson run Wild Ride, a business that creates choreography for freestyle dressage competitors.

“When I mentioned Pluvinel to Creeky, and she knew who he was, I knew I had found my collaborator,” Van Orden recalls delightedly.

Much of Pluvinel’s choreography (based on his and other manuscripts)--zigzag half passes, canter pirouettes, triangle and circle formations--Routson recognized from contemporary dressage practice. “For some of [the moves] the language was a little different, so we had to do some translating,” she says. The collaborators also eliminated some of the larger leaps Pluvinel called for, because horses are no longer bred to execute them.

The original pageant included elaborate floats illustrating allegorical themes, parades of exotic animals, stilt-walkers, jugglers, triumphal monuments celebrating France’s glory and royal virtues and elaborately costumed knights with their squires on horseback in parades, jousts and other events. According to contemporary reports, the whole “Carrousel” went on for so long that when the main event, “Le Ballet a Cheval,” came to be performed, dusk had fallen. Apparently, Van Orden says, “200,000 people attended. [Maria de Medici] liked it so well that she had the performance repeated the following week inside the courtyard of the Louvre.” That time only the aristocracy was invited.

For the current version, Routson and Trull assembled a team of 21 riders and horses, many of them regular participants in dressage competitions. All of them volunteered their services. Heidi Gaian, who won the Grand Prix freestyle at the Del Mar National Horse Show in 1998, is “dancing” with her horse Taboon. At 18.1 hands--one hand equals four inches--and 1,800 pounds, Taboon is an imposing animal, looking properly royal.

Did Gaian have any hesitation about working with Taboon in a group endeavor? Dressage, after all, is essentially a solo sport. “Not at all,” she says. Her concern was just getting Taboon tuned for the performance: “He has been to pasture for the last few weeks, but he’ll shape up.”

J. Ashton Moore, owner of Vosmaer, a 21-year-old Dutch Warmblood who, in 1999, earned the highest score ever in a Grand Prix freestyle competition, chimed in. “Anything that has to do with horses, I am in favor of.” Vosmaer will be ridden by multiple-medal winner Chelsey Sibley.

The emphasis for “Le Carrousel” 2000 will be strictly on horses and riders--no floats or jugglers or wild animals. In addition to Pluvinel’s ballet, the program includes a joust and a ceremonial entry of knights, among other events--these have been choreographed by Routson in the spirit of the original event, but only the “Ballet a Cheval” is an actual reconstruction.

The stylized joust, “Combat for the Trophy of Love,” is based on an event described by Renaissance poet Pierre de Ronsard in 1565. The weighty question to be considered is whether it is better to be unhappy when your love is not reciprocated or happy despite the fact that the chosen one is unresponsive.

“It’s always about unrequited love,” Van Orden says with a smile. “And they are always willing to die.”

On a gentler note, one of John Donne’s poems inspired “Haflingers Dance,” a quadrille performed on the caramel-colored Austrian breed of ponies that gave the dance its name. They will be ridden by a California version of young ladies of the court.

“I am thinking about spreading rose petals in their paths,” Van Orden muses.

And, finally, a divertissement of a children’s tumbling team doing horseback gymnastics will cleanse the palate for the main event.

“It really is surprising and wonderful,” says Van Orden a few days before Pluvinel’s choreography has its U.S. premiere. “It’s very different from anything that dancers could do, and yet quite clearly it is a ballet.”

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* “Le Carrousel du Roi,” Friday at 4 p.m., Saturday at noon, Berkeley Festival & Exhibition, Heather Farms Park, Walnut Creek, $13-$26. (510) 642-9988. Related symposium, Thursday, 2 p.m., 125 Morrison Hall, UC Berkeley. For additional festival information: (510) 642-0212 or https://bfx.berkeley.edu.