Freestyle Clinic

As much as the Amberlea show was fun, and the Dale Irwin and Karen Robinson clinic's informative and motivational, I will be looking forward to a weekend of not going anywhere next weekend!

The Freestyle clinic was great. As I wrote in my previous post, Karen is a very engaging speaker, and is in general a very encouraging person. These two traits made it easier to be open with ideas and opinions during the creative development process of making a Freestyle.

Day 1 started with me loading Brie and taking her over to Westwood Warmbloods. I have never had to load her by myself, but she hopped on and trailered well. The barn at Westwood is lovely, with the stalls looking into the alley on either side of the area, so the horses can watch the horses in the arena, and see right across to the horses on the other row.

The first day of the clinic was devoted to music selection; I was second rider in after Paula. It was interesting and helpful to watch Karen pick out music for Paula to ride to, and to see how some music worked, and others did not, even though they were set to the correct BPM (beats per minute).

Brie it turns out has very steady gaits, and is similar in her way of going to the left and right, so measuring her BPM was a quick process, although we needed to run through all our "tricks" such as lateral work, lengthening and such to make sure the rhythm was consistent for all our moves.

The Karen picked out some music for us; we decided Brie needed something elegant. My stipulation was I didn't want bells and whistles (and apparently I don't like to ride to Tambourines either). I did not think this an odd request, but apparently in all her years of doing Freestyles professionally, I am the first person ever, to not want to ride to a particular instrument. So apparently Rob is right and I am a tad on the difficult side at times... Of course as nobody had ever made that kind of request before, Karen realized she didn't actually really KNOW what instruments the music had, so there were a few false starts where the music reminded me too much of someone riding around with change in their pockets...

In the end we found a pretty music for both trot and canter. I will have to find some similar walk music as well based on the BMP information.

Day 2 we tried one more canter song...but this one had whistling, clapping and snapping! I tried to be a good sport and rode to it anyway, but was thankful that she didn't like it either. We decided to stick with the selections from day 1.

The choreography went very smoothly; Karen watched carefully as we did our canter and trot work to match the music, and noted the types of moves we played with and were good (or bad!) at. Today I did a few things in the warm up that I thought may work, and she agreed they looked good, so we integrated those ideas. She then added some lovely moves to fit in the remaining requirements and to add some time to the freestyle...it was just long enough by 3 seconds! I was pretty amazed that we were able to put together all the moves and able to ride it from start to finish if one 45 minute session!

Now I have the pattern it is up to me to time the transitions and edit the music as needed. Karen does this professionally, but I am too stubborn to pay for it ;)

This I learned;
1- a metronome really helps
2- having a music machine that allows you to alter the bmp on the fly really helps
3- when coming up with the choreography, consider what your horse finds easy, and use those moves to add difficulty to the test. The things your horse (or you) find hard should be done in the easiest fashion.

So...

I am thinking a few of you should set the goal of doing a training level freestyle at the bronze show in August! It will be fun, and I do think you need to do a few before you really understand and can do them well.

I also HIGHLY recommend a clinic with Karin Robinson if you get a chance! Even if just to audit (watch). It is so uplifting to be around such a positive person.

Karen

(PS: Paula....can't wait to see your freestyle! Wish I could have watched your day 2 stuff...but I loved your music selection on day 1!)