Site_6


Anna Karenina on the No.2 from Farbhof

This will be a travelling performance, which will begin and end at Site 6. The audience will board a tram at the site, and as it proceeds along its route through a contemporary town and makes its stops, Leo Tolstoy’s novel of love and passion in 19th Century Russia, will be evoked, surprisingly, and with daring.

I was thinking about people reading on public transport, and how for the duration of a journey, possibly to the most mundane of places, you could be transported in the imagination across continents, across time, across the universe if you wanted. I’m interested in the space in the tram as well. For a period of time, a group of people, predominantly unknown to each other, collect together, then disperse, never to meet in exactly the same way again, probably never to meet again at all The journey, though it may be taken every day, is a unique experience every time. There is what is happening on the tram and then there is also the world outside the window.

So what happens when the fixed narrative of a novel being read on a tram collides with the variables of the world of the reader?

Leo Tolstoy’s novel is a sweeping epic set during the turbulent times of pre -revolutionary Russia. The drama of the novel takes place in the most grandiose of locations; the ballrooms, palaces, and parlours of the Russian aristocracy. What’s more, there is a great deal of travelling by train in the novel, and some its key events take place in train stations. I like the juxtaposition of 19th century high drama in grandiose locations and the 21st century urban experience; the steam train and the contemporary tram. I imagine the audience collecting together at the site. The performance will begin and end here. 

At the start, the site will look as it does in the photograph. The audience will board one of the trams and it will begin its journey. There are performers, who throughout the journey will board and disembark at various stops and assume different roles and functions. Some may have boarded the tram at the depot, pretending to be members of the audience. There is the driver and the conductor. Their roles are ambiguous, though more than functional. But they aren’t ‘actorly’ performers. They are guides of a sort, but they shouldn’t give too much away.


Someone, perhaps the conductor, perhaps another performer who is there from the beginning is reading Anna Karenina. I don’t know how the performative aspect gets started or how it evolves, but it is through this person and their experience of reading the novel.






There will need to be some kind of guide or way through the story. It can’t be a narration, as the story is so vast. It might be a selective summary of sorts, like in those study notes books for students. Or it could be the reader’s re-telling. It could be written or spoken at times. Or moments could evolve through performance without being sign-posted at all. The sense should be that the possibilities for story telling are many, varied and imaginative and even, for that matter, not always so faithful to Leo Tolstoy. The tram will be fitted with a sophisticated enough sound system that it can function not only for announcements but for sound effect as well. We will have moments of ambient noise and music appropriate to what is occurring inside and outside the tram. It may also be used to amplify the voices of the performers, whether they are on the tram or street. I would like the action and the words of the piece, on the whole, to be seen and spoken through contemporary experience and language.

The performers might assume a character from the novel, but it is more likely that they will be everyday people, reflecting the emotions and states of mind of the characters. 

For example, in order to conjure up the argument that occurs between the husband and wife at the novel’s beginning, a contemporary couple might get on the tram, as any couple might and proceed to have a blazing row. Or the tram might stop next to a telephone box and somehow we are able to listen in on the conversation that’s taking place. It might even be that, serendipitously, members of the public, outside the windows, might unwittingly become implicated in the story, by virtue of being in the right place at the right time.

But the journey won’t be exclusively a contemporary, or even naturalistic evocation. I imagine that at moments the theatre and fantasy of Anna Karenina can blaze through. This could be achieved through music, perhaps a band could board, the way musicians sometimes do, and play. Suddenly and for an instant, the tram is full of tubas.  Perhaps, at one stop, or as the tram passes a group of performers on the street could drop their guise as ordinary people going about a day’s shopping and stage an impromptu 19th ball. In all the impression should be that instead of an attempt at a literal re-telling of the story, it is an evocation, an imagining of Anna Karenina, as imagined by the people of the town that the tram is travelling through.

When the tram arrives back at the site, the doors will open and the audience will see that the terminus has been transformed into a Russian Winter Wonderland. It is truly fantastical. It is snowing. Inside. There are people in 19th Century dress. There is music and vodka and wonder. And there’s an ice–skating rink. And we all go ice-skating.

[Lucy Taylor © 2005]

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