Freestyle: The Ultimate Guide to Riding, Training, and Competing to Music

Author  Sandra Beaulieu  The complete resource to developing, editing, choreographing, and performing a fabulous musical Freestyle performance. Award-winning musical Freestyle designer Sandra Beaulieu has a lifetime’s experience as a dressage competitor and professional entertainer. Here she provides everything readers need to know to enjoy creating Freestyles of their own―whether for fun or for ribbons. Learn how to find your horse’s beats per minute (bpm) in every gait. Find out how to choose the music that’s right for you and your horse and navigate rules of copyright. Discover easy-to-learn ways to edit your music and put together a professional-sounding playlist. Review required movements through the levels for dressage and Western dressage Freestyle tests. Explore ways to weave together your choreography to highlight your horse’s strengths and downplay the areas you are working to improve. Play with ideas for exhibition performances, including ridden, trick, and liberty work, on your own or in a group. Have fun making your Freestyle all your own with costumes, specialty tack, and more. The musical Freestyle has become a form of equestrian display that draws large audiences in horse sports of every kind: dressage, Western dressage, and Cowboy Dressage; reining and liberty; breed classes and training competitions; drill teams and quadrilles. With plenty of advice for practice as well as putting on a crowd-pleasing show, readers are sure to find all they need to get started. Beaulieu writes with infectious enthusiasm and includes advice from 27 Freestyle competitors and performers, including Marsha Sapp, Mario Contreras, Tik Maynard, Lindsey Partridge, Luke Gingerich, and Rebecca Waite. Paperback  296 pages Size  8.5 x 11 inches