box/truck is a transient performance within and surrounding a 16-foot box truck that contemplates heritage, assimilation, and “home.” Using the stories of her maternal grandparents’ assimilation as the children of Jewish immigrants, writer and director Adrienne Westwood, together with the ensemble (performer Ana Evans, musician Eleonore Weill, and media artist/performer Kathryn Logan), creates a portal of exploration into the (un)told stories of inheritance: the stories-behind-the-stories. A circus troupe sets up a tent and ring, an ancestor cooks soup, a child bottle-feeds baby lions, a family journeys across the ocean on a boat, a woman contemplates the moon: box/truck weaves delicate layers of movement, story, song, puppetry, and video to invite an individual-yet-collective contemplation and complication of inheritance. The work features production design by Westwood’s longtime collaborator Seth Easter, and production support by Theo Armstrong. box/truck is appropriate for all ages.
box/truck’s early development was also made possible by Mercury Store where Westwood was a lead artist in Spring 2023. box/truck is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrants Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council. box/truck was also developed as part of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Arts Center Residency program and at The Chelsea Factory.
Bio
Adrienne Westwood is a Brooklyn-based dance artist whose multi-layered work incorporates objects into embodied explorations of memory, bringing traces of other times and places into the present moment. Her work for cottages, flip books, nooks, crannies, screens, gardens, voicemails, as well as traditional theaters, has been presented widely in NYC and at Jacob’s Pillow, CCN-Ballet de Lorraine (France), WUK (Vienna), The Firkin Crane (Ireland), and The Philly Fringe Festival. As a CUNY Dance Initiative recipient, she created s o u n d i n g line for Snug Harbor’s historic Gardener’s Cottage in 2019; it was described as “an evocative new multimedia dance performance” (BroadwayWorld.com). Her work has also been called “a finely crafted progression” (Lisa Kraus, The Philadelphia Inquirer) and noted for its “precision, attention to detail and unspecific but tangible sense of the barely remembered” (Andy Horwitz, Culturebot).
She was a 2020-21 BRIClab artist through which she began [ ] in radical collaboration with composer Angélica Negrón, for which she was also awarded an Artist Residency at MOtiVE Brooklyn (2022), a Lincoln Center Space Grant (2022), a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant (2022), a SLIPPAGE lab artist in residence at Northwestern University (2023) and a Barnard Movement Lab artist in residence at Barnard College (2023). The installation and performance work will premiere at ODC Theater in San Francisco in 2025.
She has had extensive residencies at One Arm Red in DUMBO, and the pilot Parent-Artist Space Grant from Brooklyn Arts Exchange, through which she developed her evening-length work Record. She has taught widely as a guest artist and on faculty at University of the Arts (Philadelphia) and for Florida State’s “FSU in NYC” program (a semester of study in New York for Dance BFA and MFA students). From 2011-2018, she served on the selection committee for “The Bessie” NY Dance and Performance Awards on the Current Practices subcommittee. Deeply committed to anti-oppressive work, she trained with The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond in 2020. She holds an MFA from Hollins University/the American Dance Festival where she studied under the close mentorship of Donna Faye Burchfield, and a BFA from University of North Carolina School of the Arts.
