SPORT & OUTDOOR
Lipizzaner performance at Spier
Venue: Spier
Wine Estate, R300, Stellenbosch. Tel: (021) 809 1177 /78
/89
Time: 3:00pm
Price: R80
Date: 7-16 Nov 2003
The
Lipizzaner stallions return to Spier for five performances
starting on November 7 when their spectacular battle leaps
are expected to make it a sell-out.
The afternoon events on
November 7, 8, 9, 15 and 16 will see a team of 12
stallions and six woman riders perform many aspects of the
highly trained Lipizzaner disciplines including the
crowd-pleasing levades and caprioles, legacies from their
historic past on the battlefields of Europe.
The Lipizzaner breed is an
endangered species and the South Africa stallions account
for 28 of the 2,500 left in the whole world. Annual costs
of keeping the SA Lipizzaner Centre going amount to
approximately R1.8m each year but a corporate sponsor has
been elusive to date, says Gill Meyer, a director and
trustee of the SA Lipizzaners.
The South African Lipizzaners,
which uphold the standards of the Spanish Riding School in
Vienna, is the only school in the world outside Austria
that is known as a working stud and which raises and
trains stallions to perform. Audiences at Spier have the
chance this year of seeing one of the new stallions -
Neapolitano Rameda - give his first performance in the
Cape, performing to verbal commands while loose in the
arena.
Meyer, who in a 30-year riding
career rode 14 different Lipizzaner stallions at the
Spanish Riding School in Vienna, says it is a tremendous
honour to continue and preserve the disciplines handed
down from a time when Spanish horses, the ancestors of the
Lipizzaners, were the warhorses of the kings of Europe.
A dozen Lipizzaners arrived in
South Africa after the Second World War, after fleeing
from Hungary and the invading Russian armies. Owned by
Count Elener Jankovich-Besan who bought a small farm
outside Mooi River, the horses had escaped being turned
into horsemeat in Europe by being painted with paraffin
and oil to disguise their value.
The team of horse women who
will perform at Spier do so for the privilege of
preserving an ancient tradition on a noble breed, says
Meyer. At the outdoor arena at Spier the focus will be on
the "battle leaps" as well as the High School movements of
dressage.
War movements include the
Levade, when the horse rises on its hind-legs and
balances, protecting the warrior-rider who could look
around and use his sabre from a height; the Capriole, when
the horse leaps into the air and kicks out violently with
his hind legs - originally when surrounded by foot
soldiers - and the Courbette, a menacing jump used when
armies approached each other: the Lipizzaner advances by
leaps forward, balancing only on his hind legs.
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