THE METHOD OF CONCRETENESS

by Cristian M. Giammarini

It’s impossible to talk about a “Nekroæius’ method,” simply because it doesn’t exist. According to Nekroæius, there’s a way of working using concreteness. He doesn’t love theories, he’s not a pedagogist but a practical man - simply a director who works with actors. If he is asked what is his system, his methodology, he answers “I don’t know!”, convinced that the creative process doesn’t need neither methods or schools, and that good results can be obtained only through concrete work. The stage is not a sancturary, a sacred place on which to walk with bare feet, but simply a place of work, and hard work at that. And from this comes his incessant question to the actors every day to propose on the stage different versions of the scenes examined the day before with him - a continuous carousel of ideas expressed or shown by the actors to him, who with a concentrated, critical eye, observes.
The most precious advice: be simple, sincere in what you do, and surprise me; don’t ever stop putting to work your imagination. The exercise of imagination is necessary and indispensable to the actor who works with Nekroæius - everything is possible if there is imagination, even miracles. And so an old pan and twenty full tin buckets of water create the most beautiful moon and lake that I’ve ever seen: through Nekroæius’ imagination, dreams become reality, and reality, poetry! It’s hard at times, to not feel inadeguate before such beauty, and there are moments when you want to leave because it would be easier, but in the end, you stay, to be nurtured some more and even more than before.
We should question ourselves uselessly but have confidence and never allow anyone to undermine it: For Nekroæius an actor has to be extremely sure of himself, aggressive, strong, not timid or modest but actually “offensive” and always ready to take a risk. He has to save, defend himself any way he can, showing the light of his creativity and illuminating the world.
“How high is your sky?” Nekroæius asks this to his actors, inciting them to a constant self-probing, of their soul, their desires, their capabilities. To always reach for the highest, without every tiring, to search for the warm winds, like experienced birds, to allow the soul to fly to the highest heights. The more our desires are great, the greater our results will be even if we are able to fulfill only a part of those desires.
It’s difficult to talk about such a man, because it seems as though not enough can ever be said. It’s difficult to talk just through words about an artist who sustains everything he says and does with his heart. For Nekroæius the most important thing and of which he feels nostalgia in the theatre are the old, archaic sentiment and emotions, which have always been a part of man but which in recent times have been replaced by the “mind”, by reasoning. It’s an illusion: we will never be able to do without sentiments in theatre just as we can’t do without them in real life, he tells us, and smiling he adds “Sentiments are the only thing in the world which is truly precious without costing anything.”
Nekroæius tries to bring out the actors’ sentiments not so much by the psychological sounding of the characters and their hearts, but by building with his dazzling visionary imagination unprecedented everyday situations in which he places the actors. These “simple” poetic devices become the real scenography of the production - they completely envelop the actors, removing them of every artifice and leaving them on the stage exposed in the full light, very real, and more than ever human.
This is the way in which Nekroæius, as a modern dramatist, treats the soul of who works with him, reminding every human being of his own heartbeat.