Draft 05 20/03/09 – Not for Citation 1 EQUINE BEATS: UNIQUE RHYTHMS (AND FLOATING HARMONY) OF HORSES AND THEIR RIDERS Rhys Evans and Alex Franklin Introduction Equine Beats are the rhythmical structures and practices which make up the experience of horse riding. Horse riding, or equestrianism is an increasingly popular pastime in the UK, a phenomenon we have explored elsewhere (Franklin & Evans, 2009). In that project we focus on the ways equine activities facilitate the production of certain spaces, certain socio-natures in the rural landscape, spaces we call Equine Landscapes. Equine Landscapes are the socio-natures produced by equine activities in the countryside. They are distinctive landscapes which provide the aesthetic, domestic, competitive, training and leisure spaces in which humans enact their relationships with equines. Unlike other ‘agricultural’ animals which are raised as part of the food and commodity economies, equines provide humans with the opportunity to build partnerships which perform embodied acts in space. The walking, trotting, cantering, jumping and racing which is the point of these activities requires a working partnership between human and non-human which, due to the size of the animal and the nature of the acts undertaken, cannot be solely coercive. Rather, it requires a partnership in which both, different as they may be, act as one to produce acts neither would undertake on their own. In terms of producing space, the equine/human partnership forms a sort of actant where the drives, needs and desires of both partners matter. It is these drives, needs and desires (of both humans and non-humans) which frame and co- produce the distinctive socio-natures of Equine Landscapes. In order to understand the cumulative impacts of the collective activities of horse riders, we insist it is necessary to first understand the ways the individual horse/rider experience is constructed. In a previous paper we have used an auto-ethnographic approach to begin this task. In this chapter, we will focus down again on a single facet of the equestrian experience, using the lens of Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis (2004) to illustrate the way in which rhythm is harnessed to produce moments of rhythmic harmonization which form one of the main goals of horse riders and the epitome of the potential of an active unity of human and non-human. The limnal moments which this produces transform common rural spaces of production into ludic spaces of motion and emotion. . These are constructed out of both the rhythms of everyday life – which Lefebvre describes as subordinated to the “measure time of work which now is the ‘time of everydayness’ – and the “great cosmic and vital rhythms: day and night, the months and the seasons, and still more precisely biological rhythms” (2004, 73).