There is always a market full of people who aren’t satisfied with how well they are riding, and who think if they get the right book, video or guru, their problems will be over. They look at successful people and bristle and wonder why they can’t be successful. There are a great many people hanging out on the fringes of dressage, by some counts it is one of the faster growing riding sports.
Fast or slow, there have always been a ton of people who are disenfranchised, working along at home, reading books, dreaming of that great classical art, and either convincing themselves that they’re doing dressage, or LOOKING, very aggressively, most of the time, for someone who WILL convince them they are doing dressage!
What Parelli teaches as dressage is incorrect. It’s so incorrect it can be called ‘Not Dressage’. He is trying to make it easy, palatable, and all about this concept of ‘release of pressure’.
Dressage is NOT about ‘release of pressure’. In fact, dressage isn’t even ‘the opposite of release of pressure’.
In fact, the concept is entirely irrelvant and messes up any dressage anyone is going to try to do. The point with dressage is that there is no ‘pressure’ to release, because there IS no pressure, but a harmonious contact that needs to be perpetuated, not released, cultivated, not thrown away.
The point is, however, it is easier, far easier to market a system of ‘pressure and release’, and more people will ‘get’ it. Because it is far easier than doing what needs to be done with dressage - develop contact and a coordination of the aids that sustains a connection with the horse.
So what they’ve done is CHANGE dressage into something they can market in their way, in their format. Something they know how to teach.
It’s the same as if I wanted to teach ballroom dancing, but didn’t know how. So I hang out my shingle that says ‘ballroom dancing lessons’, and I teach you to stand on your partners’ feet, because I know how to do that, and that’s easy to teach.
You, the consumer, will NEVER know the joy and exhillaration of actually doing ballroom dancing, in fact, I’ll market it to you so convincingly that I’ll convince you that what you’re doing is not only REAL ballroom dancing, but eventually, that it’s BETTER than ballroom dancing.
I’ll make a mint, and the only thing that suffers is your partners feet.
The key is this - people want a simplified quick way to do something they are having a hard time grasping and succeeding at. Parelli, unfortunately, is like the greatest used car salesman in the universe. He has the rap down perfect. In fact, he’s such a good salesman people don’t even realize they are getting sold to.
