Saturday, September 29, 2007, 9:00 pm
Hunter Center
$10
Member tickets are not available via the internet.

For his newest piece, Neumann mines not just the motion of sports like baseball, basketball, football, tennis and soccer but uses the entire sporting event as source material — from the action on the field to the abundantly colorful jargon to the sounds and statistics that fill the arenas, fields and stadiums. This work-in-progress showing comes on the heels of a 2 week residency. Eve Beglarian will compose the score for the live trombone choir.

"Neumann's dances amaze occasionally, amuse often, and constantly lead us to perceive more attentively and thoroughly." — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
David Neumann Presents Work-in-Progress Showing of feedforward.


(North Adams, Massachusetts) David Neumann’s new creation, feedforward, will be a multidisciplinary, evening-length dance piece created with his company, Advanced Beginner Group, and featuring live music composed by Eve Beglarian for a trombone choir. Neumann and his troop will be in residency at MASS MoCA from September 16 through September 30 perfecting this re-imagining of the athletic event as contemporary dance performance. David Neumann and the Advanced Beginner Group will perform feedforward as a work-in-progress showing on Saturday, September 29, at 8 PM in the Hunter Center.


The New York Times called Neumann "an inspired Bessie Award-winning law unto himself," while the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel said, “Neumann's dances amaze occasionally, amuse often, and constantly lead us to perceive more attentively and thoroughly. That is, they do the most important thing that dances can do." The Village Voice sums him up saying, "Take a smart kid with a fluid physique, steep him in both TV and the downtown theater scene from toddlerhood, mix virtuoso dance technique with a healthy dose of street and club culture, and you've got...a recipe for startling creativity."


Lifted from the rules and strategies of several sports the movement in feedforward doesn't mimic the sports themselves, but rather explores what that athletic movement -- the proximity, duration and aggression of sport -- might mean in another context. Neumann's intent is to explore the underlying patterns of sports in order to reveal something deeper. Neumann believes there's an analogous relationship between the sporting event and a contemporary performance in their physicality, spectacle and layered experience. As he explains, "I'm taking the elements of sport to create a dance piece that will give the audience a full experience: funny, complex and nourishing all at the same time.” The premiere of feedforward will take place at Dance Theater Workshop in New York City on October 23.


Accompanying Neumann’s choreography will be music composed by Eve Beglarian for a live trombone choir. While the choice of instrument seems directly correlated to marching band performances, Beglarian’s music will not imitate half-time shows; rather she plans to exploit the correspondences between music and performance in spectator sports and in the performing arts. Although there might be some sort of musical intermission, the musicians will be fully integrated into the performance. As a choreographer Neumann believes 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 habitual gestures around new shapes. He works with basic certainty that audience members want to be treated as intelligent and curious and are usually willing to see something unfamiliar gracefully unfold before them. “We hope to uncover and discover hidden truths about the infinite continuum of human interactions through this formal approach. I imagine the dance-making methods will shift between one of chance operations and one of controlled construction. It is through the dialogue between these two methods where I hope to find innovation,” Neumann says.


As artistic director of Advanced Beginner Group, David Neumann’s work has been presented in New York at PS 122, Dance Theater Workshop, Central Park SummerStage (where he collaborated with John Giorno), Celebrate Brooklyn, Symphony Space (where he collaborated with Laurie Anderson), La Mama ETC, the Downtown Art Co., St. Mark’s Church and Mabou Mines. 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 was last seen at MASS MoCA dancing with Stacy Dawson in Pearl River, a work that joyfully exploded the ‘70s kung fu genre film. Dubbing, combat, horseback riding and a deadly chopstick battle were among some of the highlights of this downtown hit.


Neumann is the recipient of two New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards, as a performer in 1991 and for his choreography in 1998. He was nominated twice for the Cal Arts/Herb Alpert Award and was awarded a 1993 Princess Grace Foundation Fellowship in the theater, a Joyce Theater Foundation Residency in 1999, two NYFA Build Grants (’03 and ’05), the Rockefeller MAP Grant in 2004, and a Colbert Foundation Award for Excellence in Choreography in 2001.


Tickets for David Neumann: feedforward are $10. MASS MoCA members receive a 10% discount. Tickets are available through the MASS MoCA Box Office located off Marshall Street in North Adams, open from 11 A.M. to 5 P.M. Wednesday through Monday. Tickets can also be charged by phone by calling 413.662.2111 during Box Office hours or purchased on line at www.massmoca.org.

Supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.