David Neumann and Advanced Beginner Group

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Photo courtesy of Carolina Performing Arts

David Neumann and Advanced Beginner Group

Disasters make us look for anything that salvages the experience: a lesson, a meaning, a context through which we can try to comprehend (and limit) absolute devastation. As the garrulous avant-garde actor and Mabou Mines cofounder Frederick Neumann developed dementia in the last months of his life, his son and caretaker, dancer/choreographer David Neumann, was tempted to consider it his final performance. When the condition worsened during and after Hurricane Sandy’s brutal assault on New York City in October 2012, a disoriented, larger-than-life character raging at the tempest suggested nothing less than King Lear. Over subsequent years, David gradually overlaid the absurdities and pain of losing both parents in the same year onto reports of other catastrophes, from the hubris-laden real-time reports of Weather Channel meteorologists during natural disasters to the chronicles of Noh theater, which gives this work of dance, theater, and song much of its frame. —Byron Woods