On the occasion of the Genoese stop of the Nanou company, we met Marco Valerio Amico in the spaces of Teatro Akropolis, a few hours before Arsura and Specie di spazi went on stage as part of the Testimonianze Ricerca Azioni series. The co-founder of gruppo nanou shared visions, processes and motivations that traverse the company’s work and define its identity. The key junctures of Nanou’s poetics are also found in Arsura. A poetics that evokes, rather than represents, interior and sensorial worlds, using body, space, sound and abstraction to create an experience that escapes defined patterns and opens up new visions. For them, the body is living matter, a synthesis of sound, space and gesture in dialogue with a scene in which presence, sound and image are equally important. Their works proceed through non-linear narratives; the viewer is invited to reconstruct meanings, sequences and emotions from insights and fragments within a continuous flow. The stage space, composed of architecture, light, sound and objects, is an atmosphere, a perceptual rather than a real landscape, open to the indefinite, the undetermined, in which what happens oscillates between dream, memory, and transformation.

Simone Azzoni: What happens on stage in Arsura has to do with presence and dissolution, with resisting and persisting of the image. What remains with the spectator after the experience of one of your shows?

Marco Valerio Amico: The show began the moment you decided to come to the theater and sit in your seats here in front of us, and it’s already this, it’s already happening. In fact, I increasingly like to erode the edges, the limits, the differences between a chat and an image, between a dance, a sound and meeting new people, trying to pass as smoothly as possible from one thing to another, to smooth the corners between disciplines and formats. The ambition with which we make theater is precisely to try to leave a residue, a small memory that in days, years or months, can resurface in each of you.

In Arsura there’s a simultaneity of signs, body, light and space. In the creative process do these signs remain distinct? Do you work simultaneously with these signs dissolving hierarchies or do you have an order?

The creative process changes every time depending on the project. At times it changes due to a design paradigm, at times due to an order of ideas, of intuitions. In one case we started from writing. Another time we started from a light. Or from a scene. In Arsura we started from the strong artistic and linguistic relationship between me and Rhuena Bracci. We are two of the three founders of the company and we asked ourselves to stop a bit of everything we had explored and built to deepen our language. I took on the lights and she created another way of being on stage. In Arsura there’s a slightly unstable dialogue between me and her in which a continuous, reciprocal choice develops. There’s a path that is traced but the how, the when, the why is completely, continuously re-negotiated. The question of hierarchies among the different languages, among the different tools resurfaces from time to time and, during processes, is restored when it’s necessary to focus on a body, a light. It’s the attempt to find, in an orchestral complexity, temporary solos of instruments and then reposition them in the complexity, without ever losing the idea that it’s always an ensemble collaborating for a collective construction.

Listening, decision, reaction. Beyond some situations of functional frontality, where is the spectator located in the tension between you who are the director or lighting technician and the performer?

When I think of the spectator, I always think of them as a group of people who have been invited to dinner by me. Everything is set because there is hospitality, even uncomfortable (smile). It’s possible that someone might not like how and what I’ve prepared. It’s always when one approaches the table that a small freedom arises, a small choice, perhaps starting from the choice of where one wishes to sit.

In your works choreography doesn’t narrate, but transfigures the visible. Space enters the body like the shutter in the woman’s torso in Man Ray’s 1923 film Le retour à la raison. How does the spectator manage to distinguish space from body?

In recent years we’ve started to think in levels of composition. We told ourselves that each level should be able to be sufficient unto itself. The spatial installation should be sufficient unto itself and be looked at for what it is, just as the luminous progression without bodies, and then the body without light and without sound, etcetera. Then it’s necessary that there be space to allow these elements to dialogue. In that space the time of the gaze that captures everything happening there is also created. A transitive space, that allows continuous osmosis among the different compositional elements. Then there’s a virtual space, a sort of retina inside the eye in which that image perhaps remains like a ghost for a few seconds longer than the darkness that has been generated. And, finally, there’s the “room” space: the point of view in which you choose to place yourselves to watch and participate in the secular and contemplative rituality that is the show.

Sound in the piece has the power to reverse the dramaturgical sense of what is happening.

Some sounds are beautiful to listen to but are, in my opinion, impracticable for the body, that is they don’t have a space to be able to enter it; others, instead, leave the possibility to compose together. There are sounds that vanish in spaces, others that allow the body to compose, to be an additional instrument in relation to sound. It happens that the body fails to follow the progression of the music, but can be an additional counterpoint in terms of volume, speed, energy, muscular mass. The body can collaborate to amplify a progression, a climax, a crescendo, but also decompose, break down, shift the sound’s progression a little to the side. For example, when a movement occurs on a time that does not match, the tempo of that action is broken and that movement makes the composition more complex.

The words we use as critics to analyze your work are often empty. Sometimes you invent them yourselves to talk about your journey.

There are so many difficulties to face daily that, to analyze what we’re doing today, we must start from a condition of lightness. A bit of lightness and stupidity (quote) is needed in things. In the beginning we were more “heavy,” more “serious”, perhaps too serious (smiles – author’s note). Today everything is a bit simpler, a bit more playful. The lightness I’m talking about is the awareness that there’s nothing serious in everything that happens. Everything can come and go. The error isn’t so devastating but rather can be enriching and can become precisely that intuition that reveals itself in an instant and you say: “oh”.