I Understand Everything Better

David Neumann/Advanced Beginner Group’s I Understand Everything Better is a "deeply felt and deeply moving" (New York Times) performance piece, a multi-disciplinary, dance-based work that explores the impulse to report on calamity, the shimmer of attention to realms unseen, and the evidence of the body as possessing a will to let go of living.

Emerging from a year in which David Neumann lost both his mother and father, I Understand Everything Better documents a process of dying, and how the altered attentiveness of the dying and those who care for them can invite a complex layering of now and then, here and there, living room and mountain road. The text draws on Neumann’s accounts of his father’s final days as well as Noh theater, the Kyogen play Boshibari, Shakespeare’s King Lear, transcripts of live weather reporting (mostly during hurricanes), and interviews with end-of-life caregivers, doctors, and meteorologists.

Advanced Beginner Group’s 2015 production—winner of two Bessie awards for Outstanding Production and Outstanding Sound Design—includes text by David Neumann and Sibyl Kempson. Edited and designed by Karinne Keithley Syers with photography by Maria Baranova, this volume is an elegant, richly layered record of a rigorously collaged, collaborative performance that was itself a record of a storm.

David Neumann’s work as a freelance choreographer, director and performer includes a wide range of projects and disciplines. Since 1999, Neumann has worked behind the scenes to craft plays, operas, films and multi-disciplinary performances. From avant-garde theater to blockbuster films, classic opera to new musicals, David’s diverse experience has given him a unique ability to articulate ideas through performers’ bodies. Whether playing one of Shakespeare’s kings or a virus-infected zombie with an appetite for Will Smith, the performers Neumann works with gain from his multi-layered approach. David coaches individuals, has moved dozens of people through city streets, staged a hundred musical numbers, directed puppets, friends and drag queens, organized multiple Greek choruses and continues to find new ways for the human body to communicate. He has worked with stars from the ballet, film and avant-garde worlds, as well as those never having stepped on a stage, learning valuable lessons from each. Neumann has many years of teaching experience working at Juilliard, NYU, Princeton and Yale and is currently a tenured professor in the Theatre Department at Sarah Lawrence College.  He has received three Lucille Lortel Award nominations and one Fichandler for his work on Cabaret at Arena Stage.  He is the Artistic Director of ‘Advanced Beginner Group’, a multi-disciplinary performance company, which has been awarded three Bessie Awards.  He is a 2019 Lucille Lortel, Outer Critics Circle, and Tony Award nominee, as well as the recipient of the 2019 Chita Rivera Award for Choreography for his work on the Broadway musical, ‘Hadestown’. Recent and upcoming projects include the musical ‘Swept Away’ at Berkeley Rep, and choreography and coaching for ‘A Marriage Story’, starring Scarlett Johanssen and Adam Driver.

 Advanced Beginner Group has created three evening length pieces performed in New York at The Kitchen, New York Live Arts, the Chocolate Factory and Abrons Arts Center, and on tour at The Walker Arts Center, MASS MoCA, MCA at Chapel Hill, and Alverno College, to name a few. ABG has been awarded several grants and awards, including three NY Dance and Performance “Bessie” awards. Advanced Beginner Group has embarked on another evolutionary shift, in a co-collaboration with theater artist, Marcella Murray on their new piece, ‘Distances Smaller Than This Are Not Confirmed’ which premiered at Abrons Arts Center in January, 2020. David Neumann/Advanced Beginner Group embarks on each piece through an organic process begun from scratch, bringing to word, action, and proximity a delighted embrace of our contradictory lives. Contradiction is best felt through humor and it is with a strategic use of humor that the work confronts our darker impulses and actions. ABG searches for antidotes to the absolutes that separate us, and so create these works as an irrational response to our perceived place in the universe. In each work, Neumann attempts to uncover a distinct and complex view of the human experience. He embraces contradiction and juxtaposition as a means toward an active engagement with the audience where performer and observer alike are given the potential to find themselves in a more alert state, more open to the subtleties of their day-to-day experience. To even approach this desired complexity, the work is necessarily multi-disciplinary, as Neumann aims the various approaches and disciplines toward one another, and through their collisions, bend the habitual gestures around new shapes. As a dance/theater maker, Neumann focuses his efforts on the borders of the intellectual and the phenomenological, the representational and the abstract, and the personal and the cosmological with the intention to make blurry our desire to live inside distinct categories, binaries, and absolutes. David Neumann and Advanced Beginner Group desire an awakened state, full of surprise, wonder, and humor without ignoring our pain, ennui, and existential longings.