About ABG
About
I Understand Everything Better From left, John Gasper, David Neumann and Jennifer Kidwell at Abrons Arts.
Advanced Beginner Group was formed as a not-for-profit, multidisciplinary collective in 2010 to support the work of Artistic Director, David Neumann. Since that time, ABG 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.
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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.
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Advanced Beginner Group is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
Board of Directors
Amanda Brandes
Sue Killam
David Neumann
Margo Sweany
Staff
Artistic Director - David Neumann
Administrative Director - Amanda Brandes
Producer - Boo Froebel
Business Manager - Montana Lampert Hoover
