words chris lam

The Zingaro horsemen may vie with each other in a gladiatorial arena but their breathtaking antics leave no blood on the floor.

Come February and March, an unusual theatre troupe will be in town; one which Tisa Ho, executive director of the HK Arts Festival, has described as possessing a “unique style” and whose “artistic skill has been highly rated from its performances in Europe, the United States, and Japan.”

Hailing from Paris, and popularly known across Europe as the Equestrian Theatre, Zingaro cannot settle for the HK City Hall or Cultural Centre as their venue, and their métier is not memorising soapy scripts adapted from literature. They don’t recite any dialogues or soliloquies. Their wardrobe boasts Gypsy riding garments, wedding gowns elevated by white helium balloons, and tight faux leopard-skin leotards. And their usual stage is a gladiator pit in which they perform at breakneck speeds with uniquely trained horses.

The HK Arts Festival and the HK Jockey Club are co-sponsoring 32 performances of Zingaro’s latest ‘horse-play’, Battuta, from February 9 to March 23 at a temporary circular compound that will accommodate close to 1,300 spectators on the Hung Hom Ferry Pier lawn. Bringing the equestrian theatre to town is costly: 36 horses will be flown from France accompanied by a crew of 57 people – riders, grooms, musicians and other staff. But the sponsors obviously think it is all worthwhile for a show in which gallant riders flaunt acrobatic manoeuvres portraying the freedom and lifestyle of Gypsy culture, synchronised to the counterpoint of two Tzigane orchestras (strings from Transylvania and brass from Moldova).

The Gypsy theme of Battuta was purposely chosen. While Zingaro’s shows in the past have paid homage to a variety of cultures, past and present (Loungta featured Tibetan ascetics, Triptyk threw a nod to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring), Battuta’s Gypsy motif hearkens back to the equestrian troupe’s foundation and name: Zingaro means ‘Gypsy’ in Spanish and Italian.

‘Battuta’ meanwhile, can mean rhythm, tempo, or urge in Romanian; rhythm or joke in Italian; conductor’s baton in Spanish; and duck or lame human being in Arabic. The show Battuta takes its meaning from the Romanian word – and the tempo is fast enough to leave viewers gasping for breath.

About The Show
Battuta has no narrative plot; the 75-minute programme strings together episodes of equestrian stunt and fanfare that salute Gypsy culture and nomadic tendencies towards danger and adventure. Expect to catch wedding gate-crashers and purse snatchers on horseback, an artificial pig slaughtered in a moving bathtub and a man-sized bear climbing atop a rusty carriage. All this happens as the horses gallop at an alarming pace – it is enough to make one’s head spin.
From the first notes of the Transylvanian taraf string orchestra, the action is focused around a column of water from ceiling to floor, ominously lit in neon blue – a large fluid statue gazing upon the dark recesses of the theatre. The audience can discern neither the source nor the destination of the water. Bartabas, the creator and director of Zingaro, explains the symbolism, “In Gypsy culture, water never stays in a pot – it’s always flowing. When Gypsies wash, they use the water in the river. You never accumulate water, because it’s life. This is how the idea came about of the fountain of water that’s always moving. We don’t know where the water is going.”

After soaking in the mysterious blue shower for the length of the opening hymn, the first horse of the performance embarks on a brisk gallop around the circular pit, setting a challenging pace for the remainder of the performance in which riders taunt each other from the backs of Percherons or Lithuanians, each striving to outmanoeuvre the others with a display of lithe jumping, dangling, swinging and gyrating on the back of a galloping steed. It’s a form of weaponless jousting to impress rather than to fight, to boast rather than to hurt.

They play Gypsy games – hat-tossing in a ring, chase the bride, the two-horse straddle – and revel in Gypsy freedom and danger – to the equestrian acrobats, one doesn’t exist without the other. A shapely and nimble Gypsy lady dancing in a red skirt evokes Bizet’s Carmen. And we will leave to your imagination, the function of the one donkey in the show.

Behind the scenes
Bartabas, the main man behind Battuta and Zingaro, is a well-known ex-cavalier in France who, in addition to founding the equestrian theatre group in 1984, has made films on horsemanship, and established the Academy of Equestrian Arts at the Château de Versailles in 2003 (at the stable where King Louis XIV once kept a few hundred horses).

I visited Bartabas on the Zingaro grounds in the district of Aubervilliers, a suburb just north of the periphery of Paris. He and his team of horsemen live in a sort of wooden village, the centre of which is the amphitheatre in which their show is sold out five nights a week to about 900 spectators a night. This Parisian production is no tourist affair – the audience are mostly locals from greater Paris along with road-trippers from towns en province elsewhere in France.

Still, while it enjoys continual patronage with little help from far-reaching advertisements, Zingaro is anything but provincial. In the past, the troupe has performed across Europe, and lands far beyond. Battuta, the current show, debuted in May 2006 in Istanbul and, like all Zingaro’s spectacles to date, will have a longevity of three years before it gives way to the next spectacle.

Training of the riders and horses is a rigorous and excruciatingly precise routine. There are no performances on Mondays and Thursdays to give the horses the variety of alternative exercise and training. From morning rehearsals to evening strolls, daily activities have to be carried out with concentration and dedication – years of repetitive practice lead to mastering manoeuvres such as the saut périlleux (somersault on horseback) and saut à cheval (vaulting from a running jumpstart onto the back of a galloping horse and remain standing on it) – mistakes often mean fractured bones.

Life with Zingaro
Spending a weekend at the site in Aubervilliers, I became fascinated by the everyday life of the Zingaro community even more than the spectacle itself. In addition to the amphitheatre, many structures make the Zingaro campus a self-contained village, where performers – horsemen, acrobats, musicians, and Bartabas himself – live onsite in parked vehicles or wooden houses. There are also stables, an administrative centre, and a restaurant where you can enjoy mulled wine and Romanian fare before and after the show.

As a visitor from across the globe, I was hosted by the troupe with great hospitality. I sipped tea with acrobatic riders in their decorative trailers, lingered at the stables where black and white Argentine horses played follow the leader, and mused over letters written by warm-hearted parents whose children had been grateful for an awe-inspiring night at the Zingaro theatre.

When I asked one acrobatic rider to share the best experience from his nine years with the troupe, he described a transformation by the Tibetan monks who travelled to Paris for the performance of Loungta, Zingaro’s previous spectacle dedicated to Tibetan culture. “The Tibetans have changed my life,” said Michaël Gilbert, a cavalier.

“They have no material possessions, and they understand what is important in life. They only speak a little English, but most of the time it’s not even necessary for us to speak in order to communicate – I was able to learn their ways without speaking. When they were in Paris, when they said that they wanted to see the Eiffel Tower, or anywhere else, I went with them.” Zingaro, as Bartabas has said, is not just a show, it is a way of life.