Finding the soul of a horse

Each winter, Parisians venture to the ring at France’s celebrated Theatre Zingaro on the outskirts of the city to sit on wooden bleachers and watch man and horse tangle in a mysterious pas de deux. Six women in flowing hair and dresses float in on white horses. A horse charges past, ridden by an owl. Acrobats bound weightlessly off the bare back of a cantering horse. Dressed in a black cape, Bartabas, the troupe’s straight-backed, 44-year-old leader, perches regally atop a black stallion that marches in place to the click-clop of passing time. He chases a black horse through a pool, then the horse chases him.

Zingaro (“Gypsy” in Italian) is a high-concept mix of music, movement, theater and art that has been variously labeled equestrian opera, ballet and cabaret, and its pieces come together like images from a far-flung dream. The company’s 60-odd horses -- among them Picasso and Goya, Nijinsky and Baryshnikov, Balanchine and Farinelli, North, South, East and West -- are not one-trick ponies, nor do they perform with any clowns, mimes or jugglers in what some people, to Bartabas’ dismay, call a traveling circus. The only thing his troupe has in common with the circus is a ring, Bartabas says, and anyway, circus is about showing off technique. His work, like all artists’, flaunts emotions. In particular, the spiritual liaison between man and horse.

“In America, people ask me if I’m a horse whisperer,” says the tall, chain-smoking Bartabas, who talks at a gallop as horses clop by and scrappy dogs bark at the tops of their lungs. “I don’t whisper to the horses, I listen to them. I’m a horse listener.”

His life is his art

It’s a sleepy summer morning at the compound where Bartabas works and lives with his 45-member troupe and their various pets and relations, in green-and-red-painted caravans. In a nearby pen, a girl and a horse stretch their legs. A few feet away in immaculate stables lighted by a chandelier, 20 Portuguese cremolo Lusitanian horses nibble demurely and shake their sleek blond manes from sky-blue eyes.

“For me, Zingaro is a whole life, it’s not a show,” Bartabas says, shifting his long legs in a wooden chair set in an outdoor gazebo. “You could say that I work all the time. Or that I don’t work at all.”

Master of his own stylized bohemian universe, the once-bourgeois Bartabas adopted this name 20 years ago and started over in life, creating a singular art form and a lifestyle to match. But what began as an avant-garde adventure is no longer considered fringe: Zingaro is now one of Europe’s leading theater companies, regularly premiering new work at the prestigious Avignon Festival and -- as quirky as it might sound -- it’s a French cultural institution that is more art than entertainment.

When not in France, Zingaro lives up to its peripatetic name, visiting about seven cities each year. Bartabas prefers to choose just one city in a country and cultivate an audience there: In Spain, it’s Barcelona; in Switzerland, Lausanne.

The troupe has traveled to the United States only twice before, to New York’s BAM Next Wave Festival with “Chimere,” featuring Indian gypsies from Rajasthan and “Eclipse,” a black-and-white piece that included a Korean singer and Himalayan dancers. Earlier this month, Zingaro set up camp at the Eclectic Orange Festival in Costa Mesa, where, through Nov. 8, it is performing “Triptyk,” the company’s first foray into the classical music repertory. Twenty-three horses perform with dancers from Kerala, India, trained in martial arts, moving to “The Dialogue of the Double Shadow” by Pierre Boulez and Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” and “Symphony of Psalms” in the 90-minute, three-act piece.

Dean Corey, director of the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, which organizes Eclectic Orange, first saw Theatre Zingaro in 1986 in New York and persuaded Bartabas to break his one-city rule and bring the show to Southern California. “Theatre Zingaro embodies what the Eclectic Orange Festival is all about,” he says, “a melange of world culture and traditional art in one exceedingly unique and refreshing package.”

Personality is key

Bartabas -- whose own close-cropped skull slopes up to an eerily equine peak -- is an autodidact who used his early experiences with horses and street theater to invent a creative process all his own. First he picks horses for their “personalities.” Then he and his riders find out how the animals want to move and build a show around that. “Often people have an idea of the performance and choose a horse capable of doing it,” he says. “I do the opposite. I choose a horse because he pleases me -- for his charm, or, you know, it’s undefinable -- the way he walks or looks. And after, I ask myself what would be interesting to do with him to bring out certain emotions or to bring out the best in him. I don’t have a preconceived idea. It’s not very original to work like that. That’s how Pina Bausch works with dancers. What’s original is to do that with horses.”

He matches people and horses, then leaves them to build their own relationships. “I choose the human and animal material,” he says. “I don’t give courses, don’t explain too much. I try to follow my instincts. I like to take a horse, or a person -- and not just to teach them technique, but to watch them flower,” he says, a process that takes time. Bartabas travels the world -- India or Korea or Tibet -- for inspiration, bringing back dancers and musicians to live on the compound in Paris and make a new work from scratch.

He’ll take the process one step further early next year, when he will inaugurate the Academy of Equestrian Arts at the Grand Stables of the Chateau de Versailles, once the site of theater and opera performances under Louis XIV.

Students from 18 to 26, most of them female, will undertake a two-year course meant to do what he says other riding schools such as the male-dominated Spanish Riding School in Vienna or the Cadre Noir in Saumur, France, do not: Develop the artistic sensitivity of riders by training them in dance, music and singing, movement, cinema, theater, video, sculpture and plastic arts, martial arts, fencing and “new age” veterinary practices. They’ll perform in a 700-seat theater that’s under construction.

‘We don’t impose, we propose’

Developing, performing and touring a show takes 2 1/2 to three years, and once it has run, it is technically impossible to reprise it, because each show is so tailored by, and to, its riders and horses.

“That’s my rhythm,” he says, “and it’s dictated by the horses. You can’t force them. We don’t impose, we propose. It’s a long process to prepare horses psychologically and physically. A dancer or a musician can accept to suffer, because he understands the objective. A horse doesn’t understand why, so he can’t be made to suffer.”

Like all horse trainers, Bartabas dangles carrots before his horses, but his goal is to get them to move naturally, as if from their own imaginations. The result looks like a beautifully staged, perfectly harmonious collaboration.

There is no narrative in a Zingaro piece; Bartabas is less a storyteller than a conjurer of emotions. “I work the imagination of each viewer; to put people in a state to receive emotions so that they can tell their own story,” he says. “It’s hard to get people to enter into a different rhythm than the one created by television -- the American rhythm in which you take the viewer by the hand and lead them nowhere. I’m not saying I’m a genius and if they don’t understand, too bad for them. Unlike television or film or a painting, my shows only exist for an hour and a half in front of people at a certain moment. Something has to happen, and if it doesn’t, it’s not their fault -- it’s my fault.”

Bartabas makes keepsake films of all his works -- seven so far -- but he admits there’s nothing like a live show. “To me it’s all important: the breath of a horse passing, the smell, the music,” he says. “You have to help people to see details and to appreciate them. You don’t have to please them, but you have to provoke some kind of emotion -- so that they boo, break the chairs or applaud. But not indifference.”

Some of the horses that traveled to Orange County -- with Bartabas sleeping by their side in the specially equipped plane -- will move to Versailles after the Southland run of “Triptyk,” which is also an exercise in mourning for the namesake horse of 18 years that died in New York on their last trip there. “I try not to have a favorite, but it’s true there was a horse that was a bit the memory of the company, because he did 18 years of shows,” he says of his old horse, whose ashes he keeps in his caravan. “It’s hard to rediscover that same complicity with another horse; it’s not the technique but the time you spent with them that matters.... What fascinates me is not to show horses, to give a demonstration, but to show the relationship between man and the horse. That fascinates me, because the horse for me is like a mirror. It shows you what you are incapable of giving.”

Bartabas says he has learned everything from his horses, but that doesn’t mean he loves them for their minds. “Horses are dumb,” he says, taming a smile. “People are often shocked when I say that. But if intelligence is the reasoned conscience of what we might have been put on Earth to do, an animal doesn’t have that. But he feels a lot more than at least the man of today. I think the more man knows how to explain things, the less he feels. Horses are a lot more sensitive than we are.”

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Dances with horses

Who: Theatre Zingaro’s “Triptyk”

When: 8:30 p.m., nightly through Nov. 10, except Monday and Thursday

Where: Zingaro Village, adjacent to the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

Price: $45 to $75

Contact: (949) 553-2422