Travelling Symphony Rikishi

The Symphony caravans are the Travelling Symphony’s three horse-drawn vehicles, rebuilt from pickup trucks after gasoline and the systems that depended on it ceased to be useful. Their altered frames preserve a limited form of road travel while accommodating the troupe’s performance life: they carry its members across difficult territory, offer a relatively protected place for children, and can be arranged to create a stage. Their grey tarpaulins and white lettering make the vehicles both practical equipment and a moving public sign of the group’s identity.

Conversion and Construction

The caravans began as pickup trucks, but their engines, fuel-supply systems, and other now-useless components were removed. The change was not simply a matter of replacing one power source with another: teams of horses pull them, and their wheels are made of steel and wood. A bench installed on top of each cab gives a driver a place to ride, while the cabs themselves remain largely intact. Their doors close, and their automobile glass is difficult to break.

That retained structure has a particular protective use. When the Symphony travels through dangerous territory, the cabs offer somewhere relatively safe to put the children. The main bodies of the caravans were built in the pickup beds, with tarpaulins stretched over frames. The design thus combines the truck’s enclosed cab with a lighter, adapted structure behind it: some parts of the former vehicle are preserved for shelter, while the systems that once made it a motor vehicle are discarded.

The conversion also marks a generational divide. The engine, fuel equipment, and related components removed from the trucks belong to a mechanical world that people under twenty have never seen operating. The caravans remain recognizably vehicles, but their means of movement belong to a different order: animal power, repairable materials, and the pace imposed by horses rather than engines.

Travel and Daily Use

Twenty years after the end of air travel, the Symphony moves beneath a punishing summer sky near Lake Michigan. In one passage, a thermometer fixed to the back of the lead caravan reads 106 degrees Fahrenheit, or 41 Celsius, during a heat wave that has lasted a week. The troupe walks for much of the journey to reduce the weight the horses must pull. The animals need frequent rests in the shade, slowing progress further; although the Symphony wants to leave unfamiliar territory behind, the heat makes speed impossible.

The scene shows that the caravans enable movement without making it easy. Their horse teams allow the troupe to continue travelling, but their pace is bound to the animals’ strength and need for rest. The surrounding road has also changed: trees press close and grow through cracks in the pavement, brushing the people and horses as they pass. The caravans move along remnants of an older transport network, but the journey now requires walking, armed vigilance, and attention to terrain as well as to the animals drawing the vehicles.

The contrast is sharpened by the vanished convenience of flight. Airplanes still exist here and there, but they stand dormant on runways and in hangars, gathering snow or being repurposed for seasonal food storage. Against that static aviation infrastructure, the caravans represent a modest but usable mobility: they do not restore rapid travel or the old sense of looking down on illuminated towns from an airplane window. They allow a small company to proceed, slowly, through a landscape where travel has become local, exposed, and dependent on living power.

Mobile Stage and Group Identity

The caravans are also part of the Symphony’s theatrical apparatus. All three carry the words THE TRAVELLING SYMPHONY in white on their gunmetal-grey tarpaulins. The lead caravan bears an additional line, Because survival is insufficient. The motto gives the convoy’s public identity a statement of purpose: the troupe travels not only to persist but also to preserve performance as part of life after the collapse.

At St. Deborah by the Water, the vehicles become the structure for a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Parked end to end, they support a backdrop made from sheets sewn together and painted with a forest scene. Alexandra and Olivia gather branches and flowers to complete the setting, and candles mark the stage’s edges. A former line of transport is temporarily rearranged into a theatrical space; the caravans do not merely carry the company to the performance but help define where the performance takes place.

Their use connects travel and art without erasing the practical demands of either. The troupe rehearses while moving through uncertain territory, and the vehicles remain visible as its shelter and means of passage even when they form part of the stage. Their repeated lettering travels with them from place to place, while the performance transforms the space around them for an evening. The same objects that make continued movement possible also help the company create a shared public occasion.

Significance in the Post-Collapse World

The caravans embody a change in what a vehicle can be. Their pickup-truck origins recall mass motor travel, but the removal of engines and fuel systems records the end of that mode of movement. Their wooden-and-steel wheels, horse teams, and walking passengers instead make transport dependent on materials, animals, and collective effort. They are neither abandoned machines nor a restoration of pre-collapse convenience: they are adaptations built from what remains useful.

Their protective cabs and travelling stage give the convoy two complementary functions. The intact, hard-to-break glass matters when the route is dangerous and children need a safer place; the parked vehicles can also support a backdrop and help form a performance space. This double use makes the caravans a compact expression of the Symphony’s circumstances: exposure and shelter, movement and temporary gathering, survival and the work of making something beyond survival. Their importance lies not in speed but in carrying a community, and its art, forward at the pace the new world permits.