David Neumann
New York, NY
Choreographer and performer David Neumann is the artistic director of Advanced Beginner Group. The company’s work has been presented in New York at P.S. 122, Dance Theater Workshop, Central Park SummerStage, and Symphony Space, among others, and has toured to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Alverno Presents in Milwaukee, and MASS MoCA in North Adams. Neumann was a member of Doug Varone and Dancers and an eight-year original member and collaborator with the Doug Elkins Dance Company. He continues to perform and choreograph for theater, opera, and film, with such directors as JoAnn Akalaitis, Laurie Anderson, Jonathan Demme, and Peter Sellars. He is a professor of theater at Sarah Lawrence College and a guest lecturer at both Barnard College and the Yale School of Drama.
BIG EATER
BIG EATER, a multidisciplinary dance-based performance for six performers, takes an askance look at our appetites and juxtaposes our needy, conniving selves beside our more transcendent capabilities: the mind’s ability to recognize patterns across phenomena, for one. Known for his deeply intelligent, wildly funny productions, Bessie Award-winning choreographer David Neumann attempts to dance his brain on stage, finding form through an aggressive mixture of dance and theater building techniques. Using dance and theater to examine the way patterns can reveal themselves across phenomena, Neumann grounds his experimental approach in autobiography, weaving and colliding the disparate elements that make up a life: suburbia’s proximity to nature, drunkenness, 1980s TV stardom, synthetic biology, 19th century ballet and the end of the world.
Richard Sylvarnes
New York, NY
Richard Sylvarnes is a filmmaker, photographer and sound artist. His work has been exhibited in museums, galleries and festivals around the world. In 2009 he received a Creative Capital grant and in 2008 he was nominated for a Rockefeller Renew Media Fellowship. In 2013 he premiered his latest feature length experimental film The Last Words of Dutch Schultz at The Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn with a live music accompaniment by Zero Times Everything. His first feature, The Cloud of Unknowing, premiered in the International Dramatic Feature Competition at the inaugural Tribeca Film Festival in 2002 and continued on in festivals throughout Asia and Europe. The film was released by Possible Films in 2004. H.C.E., his second feature, also premiered at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival in the NYNY Narrative Competition and will be released by Cinema Purgatorio. He has collaborated numerous times with four-time Bessie Award winning choreographer David Neumann, with their most recent work premiering at the Kitchen in 2010. He has been commissioned to create videos for a diverse range of clients, including the band Interpol, fashion designer Miho Miho and a Brazilian television station, where he directed a pilot. He holds a degree in Photography from The Rochester Institute of Technology, has guest lectured at Harvard University and serves as a Board Member at The Film-Makers Cooperative.