Advanced Beginner Group Residency

Advanced Beginner Group has been in conversation with the people and history of North Carolina for the last three years. This conversation, which has included guided tours of local historically significant places and virtual collaborations with NC residents, culminates with a new work informed by their residency.

About Advanced Beginner Group Residency

In residency 2022-2025

Advanced Beginner Group (ABG) began their conversation with Carolina Performing Arts back in 2019 when David Neumann presented I Understand Everything Better. David returned as a Southern Futures artist-in-residence in 2021, this time with his collaborators Marcella Murray and Tei Blow. ABG is committed to careful and honest conversation about race in the United States. This conversation began off stage at Sarah Lawrence College where David was a professor and Marcella was a student, and has continued to this day. The years-long dialogue has been supported by several projects and artists residencies, including the collective’s time in residence with CPA. The group has presented Distances Smaller Than This Are Not Confirmed, in which fictionalized versions of David and Marcella stage a conversation about race alongside astronomical questions of time and scale, and Primer For An Impossible Conversation, which takes as its starting point a Charlie Rose interview with Octavia Butler where race privilege, and science fiction become lenses into the larger (fraught) cultural conversation and painful histories that play out in a largely white supremacist world.

In between presenting Primer and Distances on CPA stages, ABG spent time in-residence here in North Carolina where they have carried out hours of meaningful conversation. They spent time learning about the region with Sylvester Allen Jr. and Culture Mill’s Tommy Noonan and Murielle Elizéon, other Southern Futures Artists. ABG talked puppetry with Tarrish Pipkins aka Jeghetto and learned about local histories from Northside neighborhood elders. Marcella, David, and Tei spent several weeks deep in conversation with a group of 20 Triangle folks via their virtual Audience Advocates colloquium as they sought inspiration and insight during the early days of Rich With History and Other Things You Say at a Haunted House. ABG’s time at Carolina has offered Advanced Beginner Group a specifically Southern context in which to further their conversation.

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  • Distances Smaller Than This Are Not Confirmed. Photo by Kent Corley.
  • Distances Smaller Than This Are Not Confirmed. Photo by Kent Corley.
  • Distances Smaller Than This Are Not Confirmed. Photo by Kent Corley.
  • Distances Smaller Than This Are Not Confirmed. Photo by Kent Corley.

“We’re three artists that aren’t from North Carolina and we’re coming into the area and making something.  [Southern Futures] is a response to a lot of things that are happening in a community that we don’t live in… we’re trying to introduce ourselves as honestly as possible so that we can be in conversation with you all, the community. The conversation is how we make the piece. The piece is actually the vehicle; it’s our laboratory where we try to actually do the human thing. It’s not the other way around.”
– Marcella Murray

  • Rich with History and other stuff you say at a haunted house. Photo by Kent Corley.
  • Rich with History and other stuff you say at a haunted house. Photo by Kent Corley.
  • Rich with History and other stuff you say at a haunted house. Photo by Kent Corley.
  • Rich with History and other stuff you say at a haunted house. Photo by Kent Corley.
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Audience Advocates

How can out-of-town artists get to learn a place and its people better? The answer to this question came in the form of Audience Advocates, a virtual meeting of New York based ABG and local folks. David, Marcella, and Tei met virtually with a group from the Triangle for two weeks during the spring of 2022. They shared their work, research tools, brought in their dramaturg, and collected ideas from the group to inform their in-progress projects.

Take a Closer Look at the Process

Distances Smaller Than This are Not Confirmed

  • Distances Smaller Than This Are Not Confirmed. Photo by Kent Corley.
  • Distances Smaller Than This Are Not Confirmed. Photo by Kent Corley.
  • Distances Smaller Than This Are Not Confirmed. Photo by Kent Corley.
  • Distances Smaller Than This Are Not Confirmed. Photo by Kent Corley.
  • Distances Smaller Than This Are Not Confirmed. Photo by Kent Corley.
  • Distances Smaller Than This Are Not Confirmed. Photo by Kent Corley.
  • Distances Smaller Than This Are Not Confirmed. Photo by Kent Corley.
  • Distances Smaller Than This Are Not Confirmed. Photo by Kent Corley.
  • Distances Smaller Than This Are Not Confirmed. Photo by Kent Corley.
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Primer For An Impossible Conversation

Advanced Beginner Group virtually presented Primer for An Impossible Conversation in November of 2021. David, Marcella, and Tei joined Carolina's Jacqueline Laughton in conversation about the work and what it takes for two people to be in the same place at the same time.

Watch the Talkback

Rich with History

  • Rich with History and other stuff you say at a haunted house. Photo by Kent Corley.
  • Rich with History and other stuff you say at a haunted house. Photo by Kent Corley.
  • Rich with History and other stuff you say at a haunted house. Photo by Kent Corley.
  • Rich with History and other stuff you say at a haunted house. Photo by Kent Corley.
  • Rich with History and other stuff you say at a haunted house. Photo by Kent Corley.
  • Rich with History and other stuff you say at a haunted house. Photo by Kent Corley.
  • Rich with History and other stuff you say at a haunted house. Photo by Kent Corley.
  • Rich with History and other stuff you say at a haunted house. Photo by Kent Corley.
  • Rich with History and other stuff you say at a haunted house. Photo by Kent Corley.