National Incubator: David Neumann

Restless Eye

February 9 at 7:30p Buy Tickets

Master Class: February 10 at 5:00p Sign up

 

DAVID NEUMANN/ advanced beginner group believes in making multi-disciplinary dances from scratch, bringing to gesture, word, and proximity a delighted embrace of our contradictory lives. Neumann utilizes experimental dance –making approaches with a humorous outlook and an inclusive layering of disciplines to create complex, thought-provoking dance works that push the form. Neumann’ explorations challenge his assumptions on ‘how to make dance’ giving each work a distinct geography with which the viewers can examine their own assumptions. These approaches are born of the belief that there is always something more to think and feel, always another mind to engage in surprising ways, always a valuable effort in trying to bend the habitual gestures around new shapes.

In RESTLESS EYE, Advanced Beginner Group explores the realm between thought and behavior, between describing life and experiencing it. Through a collision of digital technology and a deeply physical vocabulary, Restless Eye will bring together the madness of everyday events with the vast patterns that shape our inexplicable lives. Ultimately, it’s how we bring our attention to what’s in front of us that allows art to transform us as creators and observers.

 

David Neumann has been a featured dancer in the works of Susan Marshall, Jane Comfort, Sally Silvers, Irene Hultman, Cathy Weiss, Big Dance Theater, and the late club legend Willi Ninja. He was a member of Doug Varone and Dancers, and an eight-year original member and collaborator with the Doug Elkins Dance Company, with whom he toured nationally and internationally.He continues to perform and choreograph for theater, opera and film working with such directors as: Hal Hartley, Laurie Anderson, Robert Woodruff, Lee Breuer, Peter Sellars, JoAnn Akalaitis, Chris Bayes, Mark Wing-Davey, Daniel Sullivan, Les Waters and Molly Smith. Recent and upcoming projects include: creature movement on ʻI Am Legendʼ with Will Smith, performing in ʻBeckett Shortsʼ with Mikhail Baryshnikov at New York Theater Workshop and choreographing ʻThe Bacchaeʼ at the Public Theater. As artistic director of advanced beginner group, Neumannʼs work has been presented in New York at PS 122, Dance Theater Workshop, Central Park SummerStage (where he collaborated with John Giorno), Celebrate Brooklyn and Symphony Space (where he collaborated with Laurie Anderson) and The Whitney. His work has also been presented at the Walker Art Center and MASS MoCA. Heʼs currently a professor of Theater at Sarah Lawrence College and a guest lecturer at The Yale School of Drama.

Press

  • “By now the line on Mr. Neumann is well established: He is the smart joker of dance. What’s not said as often is how deeply felt and deeply moving his work can be.” -NYTIMES
  • “Feedforward is no sneering gloss on dumb jocks; it’s an elegant, spatially adept meditation from someone who knows well the power and the absurdities of sport, as well as the primal nature of its connection to an unmistakably American sense of the world. And yes, relax, it’s wildly funny…” – NY TIMES
  • “While many choreographers have approached the athleticism these disparate physical activities share, David Neumann and his advanced beginner group have created an ingenious fragmented amalgam, a mash up of dance and stadium games…” - The Villager
  • “Who knows why some movements are heartbreaking, others hilarious? Who knows how Mr. Neumann manages to pinpoint each? And how on earth did he realize that having four onstage trombonists augment a score by Eve Beglarian was the only possible way to go? Mysteries, all — miraculous ones.” – NY TIMES
  • “And that’s just for starters in David Neumann’s feedforward, which blends the tropes of tennis, basketball, baseball and ballet to come up with the wildest performance to grace a New York stage this year. It’s funny and sad, gross and lyrical…Neumann’s been warming up for this one his entire working life…and he’s got a winner.” – NY METRO
  • “If there is an argument in the dance world that pits those who believe dance need only to be aesthetically beautiful in a simple, if contemporary manner against those who desire a more intelligent investigation of movement as art, David Neumann’s feedforward, a deeply felt meditation on athletics and the human condition now in its second of a two week run at Dance Theater Workshop, will provide the latter group with solid evidence that theirs is not only the high road, but it is a road no less beautiful, and rife with meaning.”  - Counter Critic