Artistic Director, advanced beginner group (dance company)
Associate Professor, Theater, New York University, Experimental Theater Wing and Barnard College
Guest Lecturer, Yale University
Professor, Theater, Sarah Lawrence College
BFA, acting, State University of New York (SUNY), Purchase
“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,” said The Village Voice of David Neumann.
This quote only touches on Neumann’s work as a choreographer, which is also physically sophisticated, compositionally innovative, and deals with content in an intelligent and abstract manner.
Neumann’s choreography has been presented at PS 122 and Dance Theater Workshop and has been commissioned by the Whitney Museum and Symphony Space, where he collaborated with composer Laurie Anderson. He received two coveted New York Dance and Performance BessieAwards (1991, for performance; 1998, for choreography). Some of his choreography for theater includes works for Mabou Mimes, the New York Shakespeare Festival, and Julliard. Neumann has performed in the companies of important contemporary choreographers, including Doug Elkins and Doug Varone. He appeared with Mikhail Baryshnikov at New York Theater Workshop in Becketts Shorts.
Neumann’s work has been included in the NJ Shakespeare Festival; New School for Dance Development (Amsterdam); Glenwood Springs Dance Festival (Colorado); Summerdance Santa Barbara; Harvard Summerdance; BATES Dance Festival; Summerstages Dance Concord, MA; Festival du Dance (Montpellier, France). He has given workshops at many universities including, Bucknell University, Duke University, Bard College, and University of Texas at Austin.
A recent Neumann work, Tough the Tough, is an evening-length piece, which deals with humanity, mankind, our obsession with the origins of humans, and the silliness of it all. When proposing the Evolution Commission, Neumann discussed his interest in non-human primates taking on human traits and adapting to human created environments. He anticipates that the evolution research presented at the Emory symposium will influence and be incorporated into the next piece for his dance company, the advanced beginner group.
Of his new work, Neumann says: "Big Eater (heart of glass) was made while under a spell lit by the profound beauty of Darwin's ideas. And also by the terrifying power and complexity of the mind of the species that can articulate them. I work with the body--a body that can illustrate parts of the mind that words cannot. And yet, what are words but symbols born of mind, articulated by parts of the body? BIG EATER speaks, jumps, shouts and glares---all a part of the larger dance we make between other minds and bodies, while having a crack, a shot, a stab, a go at recognizing patterns beneath the fray."