Someone had to ask the delicate question...After all, gazing at the long and lustrous manes of the 60 exotic horses who star in the
Cavalia extravaganza incites the same skepticism as focusing on that hairline of Tyra Banks' flat screen-sized forehead does.
It can't look that haute and healthy and be real. Can it.? Publicity photos for the show running at Atlanta's Atlantic Station through November 15, in particular, make the manes look too good to be true.
But the only (human) performer in the show with true ties to Atlanta insists that those flowing locks the horses flaunt onstage are "all natural".
"Do (the horses) wear extensions? No," Dacula native, Jesse Lee Cooper, said while stroking the nose of grey-maned stallion, Hades, after an abbreviated (45-minute) preview staged for the local media Monday.
"Do we (performers) wear them? Oh, yes.)
The show's trick riders, trainers and a crew of 20 handlers wash and style and crimp, cut and blow dry the horses' hair themselves. And human performers adapt hairstyles that relate to the beauty of the 12 breeds showcased.
Cooper, 31, joined the six-year-old, globe-trotting production in 2007; after years training in the art of "natural horsemanship".
He knows which horses are more vain than others, and which are prone to pull a Kanye West (bucking all boundaries of excess) onstage.
(Nothing like being thrown from the saddle to get the message: "I'm not doing that tonight", he said. "They're 500-pound animals. You can't make them do what they don't want to.")
And, you can't make this stuff up...
While giving his "wonder" horse, Hades, a prideful pat, Cooper off-handedly divulged a possible reason why the herd's had no "bad hair" days.
"I don't know if I should say, but do you wanna what we're using in the stables right now?". Cooper coughed: "It's Tresame!"
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