Equitana II - Saturday Night Showcase Part 1

The Saturday night Showcase, Festivallo Show, took us to different countries & cultures and entertained us with many different breeds of horses showcasing their talents in amazing ways. Showing strong relationships between horses & humans, dazzling displays with fire, music & moving "targets".

The show started in Brazil with carnival dancers & a festive spirit:

This was attached to a car and a moving target!

One of my fav photos!

Next came a lovely dressage Pas de Deux or Venetian type waltz on horse-back, it was stunningly done. Photos don't do it justice I'm afraid! Sorry! The male rider is definitely Frédéric Pignon (whose brother I was lucky enough to see in Dublin last summer!) I think the female rider is Magali Delgado.

FP rode bitless

We then kind of went to the circus - where we were entertained by youngsters on vaulting horses - which were huge...think 17-18hands! There was so much going on during this section of the show that i could only focus on the vaulting as the horses were involved - but there were also lots of other big drum type horses lining the arena and a huge troop of dancers/cheerleader type performers who were doing amazing things - which I didn't really watch as I was watching the kids on the vaulting horses!

Another lovely Friesan - I notice them more now since Nancy came into my life, ;)

Large vaultige horse alongside others.

Nice Ardennais horse!

All lined up for the vaultige

Sorry it's fuzzy - unfortunately I didn't manage to catch any of the amazing tricks the kids did!

On his own - no lunge line on this horse

Next we went to the Alps - i think, where a young lady showed us her horsemanship skills with her gaggle of cute welshies (i think)

Over

Then under

 

 

We were then whisked off to Portugal!

Then the first fire display started!

Same rider from earlier post Baroque class

There was a silly display between these from an eejit who rode is horse in and out of a moving trailer/horsebox - this act made me feel really unocmfortable as the leader struck me as a real yahoo who seemed more interested in being center of attention and doing silly things than looking after the well-being of his charges - it all seemed needlessly dangerous to me - so no photos of that!

But the show redeemed itself afterwards with another fire display & trapeze act which was fantastic!

 This is getting long again - to be continued in another post!