box/truck (2023)

box/truck will be presented October 20 and 21 at The Old Stone House in Park Slope, Brooklyn:

box/truck is an interdisciplinary performance work that uses the stories of writer/director Adrienne Westwood’s maternal grandparents’ assimilation as the children of Jewish immigrants to create a gateway into the exploration of told/untold stories of inheritance. In the early 1900s, Westwood’s family’s circus traveled the Great Lakes region. Imagine a production packing into vehicles, setting up a tent and ring, her grandmother bottle-feeding baby lions. Her other great-grandparents ran a grocery store. When they lost the store during the Great Depression, her great-grandmother Sarah kept the business afloat out of their delivery truck. In both family stories, a transient vehicle provides a grounding sense of “home,” a perspective box/truck imagines into a traveling performance presented within a 16-foot box truck. Made possible with support from The Brooklyn Arts Council.

[ ] (Anticipated premiere: 2025)

[ ] is a corporeal and sonic exploration into histories of femme ancestors created in collaboration with composer Angélica Negrón and an ensemble of creatives and performers. Together, we create an embodied exploration of untold and imagined histories. Weaving throughout a suspended sonic sculpture, the group uses performance’s hyper-attentive care to call in and hold experiences of private and personal memories of family lore, real/imagined histories, and femme ancestor's visible/invisible labor, ultimately asking “what is long ago but still right now?"

Begun through BRIClab 2021 [ ] will be presented by ODC Theater in 2025.

We are currently seeking additional partners.

The development and sharing of [ ] has been made possible by:

A Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant;

A residency in the SLIPPAGE Lab at Northwestern University, dir. by professor Thomas DeFrantz;

A residency in the Barnard Movement Lab;

The MOtiVE Brooklyn For the Artsts! Residency program;

BRIClab 2021 at BRIC Brookly;

and a Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts Space Grant in the David Rubenstein Atrium.

Electronic Press Kit

Spaceship made of toothpicks (2023)

Spaceship made of toothpicks is a new small-group investigation that applies my decade-long explorations of embodying history and memory toward a hypothetically-distant future. Working with collaborators, I work to weave threads of non-linear time, imagery and text to ask "what might it mean to miss what we already have?"

s o u n d i n g line (2019)

s o u n d i n g line asks what it means to belong as a woman to a family line: what is the interplay between caregiving and loneliness; does inter-generational experience persist into present embodiment? Created within Snug Harbor’s historic cottage, the performers create, inhabit and transform a recalling of individual and collective pasts through movement, shadow play, and manipulation of simple elements — cloth, rope, paper, and light.

Record (2012)

Created for One Arm Red's unique space in DUMBO, Brooklyn, Record was my first in a series of hybrid works exploring history and memory through embodiment, object and site.

calling (ongoing)

Initiated during the pandemic as a way to connect with others across distance, I began calling : a series of micro works for voicemail in which participants call in to hear an evolving text and sound work. Each outgoing voicemail’s first-person narration addresses the listener directly; coupled with sound samples from Angélica Negrón and editing by Kathryn Logan, the resulting micro works investigate themes of ancestral memory and embodiment. Each ends with the invitation for the listener to leave a message in response, which could potentially be folded into future iterations of the project. When a participant calls the number and hears the outgoing message in calling, each listener is quite literally “called in” to the potential of a new awareness of ancestral memory.

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Photos by Maria Baranova, Rachael Shane, Ian Douglas, Toby Tanenbaum and Whitney Browne.

Adrienne Westwood Projects is a project of VIA Collaborative Arts Corporation, a 501(c)(3) public charity recognized by the IRS as VIA Collaborative Arts Corporation. We are also registered with the New York State Charities Registration Bureau. Our Federal EIN is 20-2838552 and our NYS Charities Registration Number is 21-21-53.

Adrienne Westwood