War, Dance, and Sports Meet on Stage

Two weeks before the New York premiere of his latest work, choreographer David Neumann is sizing up the stage at Dance Theater Workshop. As he strides along the stage’s edge, fragments of his low, contemplative murmur float through the space: “Connecting the telephone to the soundboard? ... Okay, so, the double-stick tape will go right here ... ” The theater is dim and motionless, with a tangled canopy of lights looming high above the wide-open floor. But it won’t stay this way for long—bright white marley, stadium lighting, a live chorus of trombones, and, of course, Neumann’s Advanced Beginner Group are just days away from invading the space for their 11 show run of feedforward.

For those who saw Endzone at Minor Latham Playhouse last fall, the multidisciplinary feedforward might be reminiscent of its older, better-looking sibling. Endzone, co-directed by Neumann and members of the Barnard dance and theater departments, began with the idea of “looking at football choreographically,” Neumann explains. “A lot of the elements that go into a sporting event make it analogous to contemporary performance,” from playing out in “real time” to its “narrative dramas that flare up and go away.” feedforward explores those analogies in new ways, borrowing a look and feel from its predecessor while expanding in thematic and visual scope.

A dance with an ice-skating announcer, an air horn, a squirrel mascot at “halftime,” and a cheerleading duo (danced by recent Barnard graduates Jo Kirk and Jo Morris) might seem like just plain fun. And at times, Neumann says, it is, claiming, “A very important part of my work is a sense of humor, an ability to laugh at myself.” Still, feedfoward sometimes treads political and “sexually aggressive” territory, issues that make noise-making props and double-stick tape seem trivial in comparison.

Neumann’s effort, in light of this, is to engage viewers in an open dialogue rather than to “proselytize” a fixed point of view. “I like the idea that what I’m doing is actually having a conversation with the audience,” he remarks. “I’m setting up a kind of a back-and-forth.” Neumann makes it clear that his goal is never to deliver a neatly-wrapped take-home message. “This is not term-paper art,” he says. “I’m not going to try to make you agree with me, like, ‘Right? Sports are like war!’ There is no end hypothesis, no ‘and in summary, ta-da!’”

For Neumann, the importance of open interpretation—of the viewer’s agency—drew him specifically to live sporting events rather than televised ones. Unlike the TV camera, he says, which dictates the viewer’s gaze, live action gives each spectator “a choice of things to look at,” allowing room for multiple readings of the same event. This is the kind of varied experience he wants his own audience to have. “It feels more honest to me, in this day and age,” he says, “to let everyone have their own reaction.” And ideally, individual reactions themselves will be fluid, something people can return to and rediscover. “I remember seeing some shows where I was wrestling with the ideas for two weeks,” Neumann says. “I found that really exciting. You keep coming back to it, you might even want to go back and see the show. So that’s the desire.”

Just as the message of feedforward is never quite fixed, neither is its structure. As Neumann describes it, his creative process resembles laying down the rules of a game, with loose sets of instructions guiding each performer’s role. “There’s no written music, but rules governing what gets played,” he says. “The dance is discovering one set of rules and the music is discovering another and the text is not necessarily talking about what is happening in front of you.” This makes for the strange juxtapositions and incongruities for which Neumann is known, and which often hold rich, unexpected meanings. “The combination of these events is somehow larger than the parts, is the hope,” he says. “When they [incongruities] do coincide, or even contradict one another, something exciting happens, something unpredictable, and something free of any kind of dogma or one person’s point of view.”