box/truck

Oct 20 + 21, 2023 at The Old Stone House, Brooklyn

Written and directed by Adrienne Westwood 

Performed by Ana Evans

Music and songs performed by Eleonore Weill (accordion, hurdy gurdy, wooden flutes)

Production design by Seth Easter 

Additional musical, directing and process support by Kathryn Logan 

Dramaturgy by Hadar Ahuvia

Puppetry/Yiddish/Circus/Yiddish Circus consultant Jenny Romaine

Production management and additional lighting by Theo Armstrong

Additional puppetry coaching by Rowan Magee

It is February 2021. I'm worn down by over a year of the pandemic, and of parenting through it. I'm grappling with my role in white supremecist systems here in the US and, in trying to undo these systems, am trying to better understand my Jewish ancestors' immigration and assimilation stories. 

When I don't understand something, or can't answer a question, I turn to my artistic practice. Having made body-based work for close to two decades, I look to the body to do what I often feel words cannot: hold multiple truths at once and suggest possibilities while being open to many interpretations. Within this process, I often feel called by an image, and then spend an inordinate amount of time trying to achieve that image. But, in that winter of 2021, I realize that in terms of accessing my own ancestors' stories, my commitment to working without language may inadvertently be an avoidance of explicitly addressing my particular questions, and my discomfort. My Jewish ancestors feel so far away I don't know how to find them in my body. So, reluctantly, I begin to write. Bonus! This is something I can do alone. With pen to paper, I take stock of what I "know" about my ancestors, to see what might lurk in the empty spaces between the many snippets of passed-along family stories. I bring these fragments into a writing workshop with my friend Karinne Keithley Syers. I reluctantly share this writing. I'm told by several fellow Jewish writers that the format of questioning I have settled on is inherently “SO JEWISH!” 

It is February 2022. I'm lucky to be in residence at Mercury Store. I'm exhausted. I'm waking my child in the morning for school. In this exhausted moment of daily routine, I am suddenly my great, great grandmother waking her child, in 1905, fleeing pogroms in what is now Ukraine. I don’t know her name. I'm contending with my extreme privilege here in Brooklyn, as a parent, as an artist, feeling so grateful to be making work...and I'm thinking about my relationship to her, my great great grandmother, wondering about her experience. I write myself and my children into the text, not sure if or how it all “fits.” 

It is October 2023. I am in the thick of full-time rehearsals with dear collaborators, for the box/truck performances. Again, I am exhausted. Again, I am so lucky. And so privileged. Again, I am waking my kids for school. Gutted by the horrific attack in Israel. Gutted by genocide in Gaza. My sleeping children become these children. My heart breaks. I can't possibly do this “circus” show, at this time. 

And yet: I know telling these stories is important. I know their complexity, specificity and multiplicity is a way to celebrate the thriving Jewish Diaspora that's right here in New York. A Diaspora that I'm thrilled to have been welcomed whole-heartedly into as I first timidly, then excitedly, dove into this project. A Diaspora, that in celebrating its many stories, has the possibility to interrupt dominant white supremecist narratives.

Themes of visibility and obfuscation, of closeness and distance, of holding many truths at once, of a line of connection that one repeatedly tries to catch, to hold, to understand, to release: these are the themes that emerged as I grappled with these parts of my story and which I'm humbled to share with you now. 

BIOS

Adrienne Westwood (writer and director) is a Brooklyn-based 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).

Adrienne 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), and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant (2022). The installation and performance work will premiere at ODC Theater in San Francisco in 2025. 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). 

Adrienne is a 2023 artist in residence at both SLIPPAGE lab at Northwestern University (Dir. by Prof. Thomas DeFrantz), and at Barnard Movement Lab. She has previously received 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. Adrienne 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.

Ana Evans (performer) is a theater maker, actor, and teaching artist based in Brooklyn, originally from Minneapolis Minnesota.  She graduated from UNCSA with a BFA in Acting. Upon moving to New York she was a Kenan Fellow at Lincoln Center Education where she co-directed a devised piece titled Variations on a Blueprint.  Some of her other directing credits include an adaptation of The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein, and an original adaptation of Peter Pan titled The Very Lost Boys Present, both of which toured to elementary schools around North Carolina.  Some of her favorite performance credits include The Moors by Jen Silverstein, Top Girls by Caryl Churchill and the world premiere of Akeelah and the Bee by Cheryl West at the Children’s Theatre Company and Arena Stage directed by Charles Randolph Wright.  In her work she’s driven by questions surrounding sex education, gender and queerness.  She chases the juicy experiences on stage that shake us up, stir us around, and pour us out changed.

Raised in a musical family in southern France, Eléonore Weill (musician) spent her youth surrounded by both classical and traditional music. She holds diplomas in Recorder, Piano, Music Theory and Chamber Music from the Regional Conservatory of Toulouse and the National Conservatory of Paris, and also learned from the “Street Music School” playing Mediterranean traditional music (mostly Occitane, Romanian and Jewish music) on wooden flutes, hurdy gurdy, and accordion. She then went on to complete a master’s degree in Ethnomusicology from Sorbonne University in Paris and spent a year living and studying folk music in Romania. She has enjoyed a versatile career performing early, classical and contemporary music, klezmer and Yiddish song, Romanian folk music, Occitan folk music, and various other styles on wooden flutes, piano, and vocals throughout Europe and the New York metro area with the C.M.B.V. (Baroque Music Center of Versailles), Orchestre National de Toulouse, Les Saqueboutiers, Ensemble Oneiroi, Miquéu Montanaro, Jenny Romaine and Great Small Works, Joey Weisenberg, Shpilkes, Jake Shulman-Ment, Les Eclats and many others. After years of travel and study, Eléonore now resides in Brooklyn, NY where she performs and teaches music.

Based in Brooklyn, Theo Armstrong (they/he) (production manager and additional lighting) is a movement artist and writer who holds a BA in English Literature and a BFA in Dance Performance from the University of Iowa. They have collaborated with various artists like Portia Wells and BodyCartography Project, and their choreographic work has been showcased at venues such as The Tank and Green Space. Additionally, their written work has been featured in publications like Isele Magazine and Brooklyn Rail.

Hadar Ahauvia (dramaturg) moves between identities, reverberating from ruptures enacted within three generations of diaspora from Europe, to Israel/Palestine and the US/Turtle Island. A white Jewish Ashkenazi artist, her work reshapes Israeli folk and traditional liturgy, proposing embodied repair, through choreographic and vocal practice. As such it is an homage and break from a lineage of Zionist cultural workers. Ahuvia was and named a Dance Magazine “25 to Watch in 2019”, and her work “Everything you have is yours?” earned her a 2018 Bessie nomination for Outstanding "Breakout" Choreographer. Ahuvia has been an artists in residence at DTW/NYLA (2012 Fresh Tracks Artist) Movement Research (2015 AIR), the 14th St. Y (2016 LABA Fellow), Art Stations Foundation through MR’s GPS program, CUNY Dance Initiative at the College of Staten Island (2017), EtM Choreographer + Composer Residency at Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning (JCAL), Whitman College, Mana Contemporary, Yaddo, and Baryshnikov Arts Center. Her work has received support from the Brooklyn Arts Council and New Music USA. It has been presented at DTW/NYLA, the 14th St Y, Art Stations Foundations (Poland), Tmuna Theater (Tel Aviv), The James Gallery, Danspace Project, and Gibney Dance.

Seth Easter (production designer) is an Emmy-award winning designer for live performance and large-scale televised events. Collaborating with Adrienne since 2005, their creations are known for fusing technical elements with a homespun imagery to create poignant, lingering imagery and experiences within each unique performance setting. Off-Broadway credits also include The Summer Play Festival (Courting Vampires and How Love is Spelt at Theater Row Theaters) and The Boy In The Bathroom (Urban Stages) for which he received the New York Musical Theater Festival (NYMF) Award for Best Design. He also designed Sonnet Repertory Theater's Twelfth Night (for which his "sharp set" was hailed by the New York Times), Nighttime Traffic for NYMF at Urban Stages, Harry Connick Jr.'s run at the Neil Simon Theater, and James Taylor/One Man Band for PBS. Seth is a graduate of University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

Kathryn Nusa Logan (additional musical, directing and process support) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator employing experimental art methods to imagine alternative relationships between humans, technology, and the natural world. Logan has shared her work internationally in Scotland, Cyprus, Sweden, and Brazil and across the U.S. in venues including the Lincoln Center Clark Studio Theater, Movement Research, The Wexner Film/Video Theater, and Center for Performance Research. In her iterative screendance work The Maya Project, she studies the camera as an anti-oppression tool, interrogating the dominant gaze by engaging in new, somatic-based practices of looking and interacting with technology. As a video dramaturg, Logan works closely with directors and choreographers to utilize the camera for multi-media performance, experimental dance film, or documentation from within performance events. In all her work, she imagines more sustainable ways of being in the world, and practices them through art process and performance. Logan began working with Adrienne Westwood in 2011, and has been consistently diversifying her role in their creative collaborations, often operating in a fluid disciplinary capacity. She holds degrees in Dance from University of North Carolina School of the Arts and The Ohio State University, and is currently serving as the Executive Director of the Office of Creative Propulsion in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at James Madison University.

Jenny Romaine (puppetry/Yiddis/circus/Yiddish circus consultant) is a director, designer and puppeteer and co-founder/artistic director of the OBIE winning Great Small Works visual theater collective. She is music director of Jennifer Miller’s CIRCUS AMOK and artist in residence at Milk Not Jails and Inside Change. With Great Small Works Romaine performs, teaches, and directs in theaters, schools, parks, libraries, museums, prisons, street corners, and other public spaces, producing work on many scales, from gigantic outdoor spectacles with scores of participants, to miniature shows in living rooms. She has directed and designed community based spectacles for numerous projects in New York City and around the world. Romaine was a sound archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research for 13 years and for several decades has drawn on Yiddish/Pan Jewish primary source materials to create art that has contemporary meaning. Her projects include the Sukkos Mob (featured in the film Punk Jews), community Purim Shpiln with the Aftselakhis Spectacle Committee, The Revival of the Uzda Gravediggers with Geoff Berner, Sadie Gold Shapiro, and Belarusian poets Siarhej Chareuski and Maryia Martysevich. “Bobe Mayses" – Yiddish Knights and Other Impossibilities with the Other Music Academy (Weimar/Berlin), Soul Songs: Great Women of Klezmer with the Philadelphia Folklore Project, and Muntergang and Other Cheerful Downfalls with Great Small Works. She partners with Rosza Daniel Lang/Levitsky, Ira Khonen Temple, Milo, Inside Change, Jessica Lurie, Daniel Majesty Sanchez (Z’L), Tychist Baker and many others. She was the first recipient of the Adrienne Cooper Award for Dreaming in Yiddish (2014), received a Marshall Meyer Risk-Taker Award from Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (2015) and is featured in "Dazzle Camouflage: Spectacular Theatrical Strategies for Resistance and Resilience" a monograph by Ezra Berkley Nepon. She is currently a Visiting Professor at the Pratt Institute department of Performance Studies.

THANK YOU

Thank you to so many dear and generous sources of wisdom throughout this process: Jenny, Hadar, Karinne, Suzy; and thanks to collaborators Ana, Leo, Kathryn,Theo who imaginatively, lovingly and tirelessly collaborated to make this show a reality. You are all my teachers. Kathryn especially, thanks for imaging with me for many years, and for creating so many gorgeous projections we didn’t end up using (yet)! 

Thanks beyond anything I can sufficiently express here to my partner through it all, Seth. You help my visions come to life, and make them better. Thank you to Materials for the Arts, and to my mom for saving so many of the objects you see in the truck, including all my old dance costumes. And thank you, to my mom again, as well as my Aunt Barbara, for holding down the fort at home while Seth and I were in weeks of very intense rehearsal. Thank you to our kids for their deep understanding, wisdom and perspective. Thank you to The Old Stone House for so generously hosting us, and to Kim and Madeline for saying “yes!” to a performance in a truck, and for making it an easy process. Last, but most certainly not least, huge gratitude to All Sorts Scenic for lending numerous helping hands.... and the truck! Thank you for once again enabling my close-to-impossible vision. 

box/truck was birthed in my friend Karinne Keithly Syers' Pelagic School with a cohort of playwrights whose gentle urging and vivid feedback allowed these ancestral stories to take form on the page. Its early development was also made possible by Mercury Store where I was a lead artist in Spring 2023. I am indebted to phenomenal Mercury Store ensembles members Danyel Gaddy, Maia Novi and Mickey Tropeano who helped develop and shape the text with me, and bring it to life for this first time.

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 developed as part of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Arts Center Residency program (LMCC.net) and at The Chelsea Factory.