Meeting points: choreographies of horses and humans

Abstract

In this paper, I explore horse-human interactions as ‘meeting points’, using three points or places at which we come together with horses. These are: in the stable, leading a horse, and riding. Each shapes the interspecies engagement, in a kind of trajectory. Ways of engaging with each other form within the confines of stable or corral, which then continue into other activities. The idea of meeting points serves to emphasise that these are meetings with an other, someone who has agency and who helps to create the patterns of subsequent interactions. These are meetings born out of individual experience, and which help to produce the mindedness of the horse.