David Neumann/Advanced Beginner Group'sI Understand Everything Betteris 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 Betterdocuments 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 playBoshibari, Shakespeare'sKing 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.
About the Author :
David Neumann Department at Sarah Lawrence College. He has received threeLucille Lortel Award nominations and one Fichandler for his work on Cabaret atArena Stage. He is the Artistic Director of 'Advanced Beginner Group', amulti-disciplinary performance company, which has been awarded three BessieAwards. He is a 2019 Lucille Lortel, Outer Critics Circle, and Tony Awardnominee, as well as the recipient of the 2019 Chita Rivera Award forChoreography for his work on the Broadway musical, 'Hadestown'. Recent and upcomingprojects include the musical 'Swept Away' at Berkeley Rep, and choreography andcoaching for 'A Marriage Story', starring Scarlett Johanssen and Adam Driver.
Advanced Beginner Group 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.
Review :
“I Understand Everything Better takes choreographer Neumann’s already-wonderful touch for movement and the wry phrase and cuts it into diamonds… Neumann has just entered a triumphant next phase of his work… here he makes something for his company, Advanced Beginner Group, that feels genuinely important, both to the form and to minds of those who see it.” —Time Out New York
“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.” —New York Times
“Both in the text, written in collaboration with the fine playwright Sibyl Kempson, and through a richly collaged sampler of movement styles that runs from modern American dance to classical Japanese theater, Neumann twins his winningly off-kilter humor with heavier forces.” —Claudia La Rocco in Artforum
