Animal Magnetism, page 2
These ingenious new displays are sure to charm tourists, suburbanites and kids. But what, if anything, is going to win the hearts of people glued to their jobs or otherwise tied to a world that's growing progressively more hostile and unnatural? Urbanites, those Americans most radically disconnected from the influence of the wild world, are the people we expect would care least about animals. The most extreme specimen of humanity-isolated-from-nature, the citizen under glass, probably lives in New York. Besides not knowing which end of a cow is which, New Yorkers automatically mistrust any impulse they can identify as middle-American. Recently, an animal act slated to open the avant-garde Brooklyn Academy of Music's fall season had administrators gnawing on their nails.
Promoters worried that an equestrian theater troupe from France without a recognizable human name attached to it might not thrill hard-nosed intellectuals who cut their teeth on 12-tone opera. As it turned out, the ensemble, Zingaro, captured audiences with a ferocity that had every major publication in town scurrying to review it. "Chimere," the high-concept/low-tech spectacle acted out by Zingaro's 26 horses and 22 people, was performed entirely inside a shiny black tent pitched in downtown Manhattan's Battery Park, just a stone's throw from six lanes of traffic and the lights of Wall Street. The show that had caused its backers to fret about losing their shirts was extended twice to meet the demand for tickets. Its entire run sold out, even after the price was boosted a healthy $15 on top of the original $60.
They should have known. City slickers have been starving for just this kind of nourishment.
Zingaro raised a lot of questions about animals as performers, questions that stir up our deepest personal anxieties, not only about animals' well-being but our own. For a little while, it transformed a once common animal, one that's not usually noted for its dramatic presence, into something of stern, almost mythical beauty. And perhaps most important of all, it made the city into an entirely different place. New York's overwhelming skyline was, for once, not a barrier to a visitation from the animal kingdom. It was, in fact, the bait.
Zingaro was a fantastically expensive venture to import, and it took a rich city like New York to afford it. Bringing it here was like moving an entire village, since there were tents, rigging, costumes, musicians, instruments and handlers in addition to the horses, riders and director. People who'd seen the troupe perform in its own small town in France predicted that the city would only increase the impact of the show, and they were right. The most entrancing aspects of animals take on a special poignance in an urban landscape. City life is tough. The dearth of sensory and social stimulation that goes along with most contemporary, computer-driven jobs bores people in a vague and often indescribable way. The more we traffic in the abstract and the technological, the more we're going to feel the absence of a certain warmth and chaos, the things we tend to think of as "wild."
The kind of curiosity that flourishes in these conditions is a lot like romance: It idealizes the object of desire, of course. And it's horribly unrealistic. An urban person wants his or her perfect animal to be grazing at the edge of a shadowy wood, or looking down from an unassailable mountain of snow. The typical animal sighting is rarely this pure. And, in fact, a little artificiality in the environment tends to make a beast pop right out of its frame, as anybody who's ever seen a police horse standing in front of Bloomingdale's can tell you. Put a creature on a stage, where every single aspect of the scene is fabricated, and the homeliest quadruped fairly phosphoresces with mystery. The phonier the background, the more stunning the physicality of the creature in question, until you arrive at the effect of a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.
Thanks to some clever cosmetic tricks, and the director's uncanny grasp of the true nature of horses, the Zingaro steeds were unquestionably, deliberately exotic. Horses are extremely resistant to changes in their environment and to any alterations on their own bodies. You can't put hats on them, wrap anything distracting around their legs, or fiddle with their faces. (Some won't even let you touch their ears.) Instead of trying to disguise the equines, Bartabas, the director and trainer, gently exploited some of their odder natural characteristics.
The results were surprising. He rode one horse — an Anglo-Arab of a particularly sculptural, deerlike constitution and ethereal red-gold color — into a shallow pool of water in the middle of the ring, and made it stand still. At some invisible signal, the horse quietly spread his feet apart, stretched his back, and arched his thin neck, making a long bridge of his body. Horse and man became an animate sculpture, with dips and curves and details and enticing texture, odd because it was motionless, entrancing because it was alive.
That a creature as familiar as the horse can be transformed into an exotic apparition is quite a feat in itself. Sometimes, grooming was all it took to turn Zingaro's equine performers into something rich and strange. Two enormous draft horses — one black, one white — entered with dancers perched on their rumps, looking like fairy-tale monsters. Their lustrous, shampooed forelocks and manes had been allowed to grow unclipped for many years. Anyone who looked to their faces for something that would reveal a direction or a mood saw nothing but 18 inches of rippling, featureless hair. Their eyes stayed hidden until the horses began their slow, lumbering canter and their long locks blew back. Then their impossibly long, boatlike noses were revealed, and so were their expressions, sober and sad.
One of the tragedies of being human, if we could define such a thing, might be how earthbound, heavy and careworn we feel. In comparison, an animal's freedom in its body is exciting, something we believe we too could express if only we knew how to let it out. A particularly graceful creature could show us how to transcend our clumsy limitations by demonstrating how to release the kinetic power within. That's why running horses are sublime.
Bartabas staged a sparklingly creative demonstration of the flat-out gallop by doing a twist on an old circus trick. A pair of wild-eyed Arab coursers came thundering into the tent at bloodcurdling speed. Their riders, both men, hung off by their feet and, whooping and yelling, unraveled their turbans so that each pair was trailing 20 feet of streaming scarlet cloth. Arabian horses, being small, can gallop faster and harder in a small circle than the larger breeds; they looked like they loved it. The first two rows of seats in the tiny arena were showered with dirt, but nobody, including a woman in an iridescent orange, bare-shouldered pongee silk evening gown, even flinched.
As long as they're doing their natural thing — in this case, running like scalded cats — we don't second-guess the ethics of animal presences. It's when they start acting "civilized" that modern people get antsy, because that's when they activate our displaced anxiety. If you can judge from the reviews and cocktail debate it inspired, the one Zingaro routine that audiences really latched onto was Bartabas' balletic dressage demonstration at the climax of the show. With no perceivable direction except for rhythmic clicks of his tongue, he guided a thick-necked Portuguese gray through cat-like steps, movements of aggression and flight, in perfect time to the music, at one point turning the horse into a statue by making it balance on its hind legs. The gray was utterly supple and obedient, but his exertion was obvious; his neck quickly got slick with sweat. At the end of a particularly difficult series of steps and poses, the master caressed his mount's neck with such astonishing tenderness it seemed he was going to kiss it. And he did.
Elements of this performance clearly made viewers nervous, calling forth questions about what's good, natural and kind in human/animal relations. Obedient behavior always sets off alarms among brainy bohemians. Isn't there something militaristic about the way the chef d'equipe rides? What did they do to those ponies to make them behave? Perhaps so many people feel leery of trainers because they themselves have been bullied to conform. Conformity is a particular anathema to smart people. Lacking regular contact and experience with furry beings, we still embrace them as an externalized version of our (preferably unfettered) inner selves. The dance critic of New York Magazine remarked that she couldn't help but be impressed by how the Zingaro horses performed. "But," she continued, "I wonder if it's a good idea to make them do things like that."
It's clear we often want to protect animals, sometimes as a way of feeling safe ourselves. Behavior that's strongly codified and controlled always hints at some terror underneath. That's where the thread of commonality between people and animals snaps. We see; we suspect. But the animals can never tell us what happened to make this so. How much do we really want to know?
Still, however little we have left of our unadulterated animal selves, there's one human characteristic that still seems natural, and that's our curiosity. Call it biophilia — as scientists from Harvard and Yale have done — call it cosmic loneliness: We want to communicate with anything we think will listen. That urge becomes almost overwhelming after watching a two hour performance by animals who show us so much of themselves.
The troupe's last hurrah was like a mock cavalry charge, every brightly costumed person and horse cramming itself into the tiny ring and dashing madly in opposing circles. The music built to a grinding crescendo, and suddenly, they all exited except for one palomino. He stood stock-still, a beautiful Indian dancer on his back. Bartabas entered on foot, waving two training whips. Up went the animal onto its hind legs, rearing toward the sky, and the woman whipped her entire body straight back forming a golden tower with the horse, her black hair trailing behind them in the water. With one voice, the audience just said, "Oh!"
There's the lock between human and animal. The man made the request, and by obeying, the horse turned itself into a spectacle that was entirely unnatural, but also mysterious and overwhelming. You could almost feel the audience trying to fit a language into its applause, something the horse would understand. The ovation was remarkably soft and restrained. The animal didn't seem frightened or bored, but he certainly wasn't impressed.
Should he be? Ascribing human characteristics to nonhumans is not only intellectually discredited these days, it's unfair to the animal: That's the activist's stance. If you've read behaviorists like Donald Griffin and Frans de Waal, or pitbull defender Vicki Hearne, however, you know there's another way to look at it. For many animals, a life in concert with humans is a good life. It may very well be that beasts, like some people, can be happy in their work and have no problems showing it. I know one horse who does a little victory dance every time he clears an imposing-looking jump. The Zingaro horses are certainly the picture of abundant good health: focused, aware, shiny and, if looks mean anything, proud.
Peoples' fears for themselves and for the animals they love are genuine, but it's also possible that some of the protective criticism Zingaro inspired was just a mask for feeling left out. There's one way to find out if there's enough going on between the trainer and the animal to justify our jealousy. If you could be alone with one of those horses — maybe hop on its bare back, whisper in its ear and feel it sprint for the horizon — then you'd have a sense of why both sides of the human/animal collaboration keep coming back for more.
Sally Eckhoff's writing has appeared in the Village Voice and the New York Times, among other publications. CALL OF THE WILD:
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