ABSTRACT
As horses cannot dance in the same way as humans, and vice versa, the ambiguity of staging a dancing horse's performance embodies a cross-species critique. This chapter analyses how the historically inscribed dancing horse performance form joins societal critique with bodily animality. It draws attention to the practice of artistic self-dressage in the dancing horse choreographies of Yvonne Rainer (1968), Rose English (1975), Mike Kelley and Kate Foley (2004–05, 2009), and explores issues of alienation, emancipatory second-wave feminist politics in regard to the animal rights movement, and the increasing subsumption of artistic performances into the neoliberal operations of the culture industry, which makes artistic performances prone to increasingly resemble entertaining circus acts.
