Recommendations

It was a really wonderful time for me. A time of growth, fun and being together as a group. I had the pleasure of working with Eric in class for two years. When I started the first course, I didn't speak Italian well yet, but I never felt left out. On the contrary, Eric helped me understand everything and be able to take part, even starting out with just a few words.

I am very grateful for this experience and for having had Eric as a teacher and mentor. We put on two beautiful shows, and he helped me open the door to theatre, a door I used to be afraid to walk through.

Thank you for all this wonderful time!

Having Eric as a teacher is one of those experiences that stay etched in your mind and in your heart: with his infectious energy he manages to multiply his students' own energy beyond measure, and all with tremendous empathy.

Crossing paths with him on my theatre journey was an immense stroke of luck, and I hope I get the chance to "live" in his classes again.

I had Eric as my teacher during my first year at the Minima Teatro school in Milan, and I got to work with him throughout the year, all the way to preparing the final show, Il treno ha fischiato, based on Pirandello’s short story.

What I appreciated most about his way of teaching is his ability to create, right from the start, an environment where you feel free to experiment, make mistakes and put yourself on the line. For someone like me, coming to theatre with little experience, that was especially important: Eric manages to be demanding without piling on pressure and to give very concrete direction, while still leaving room for each person’s personality and sensibility.

One of the things that struck me most was realizing, at the end of the course, how far we had come. We had started out practically from scratch and, within a year, we managed to stage a show nearly an hour long, keeping up the energy and intensity on stage from beginning to end. Personally, that was one of the things that impressed me most about the work we did with Eric, and it made me see how much we had grown over the year.

All in all, working with Eric was a very positive experience: a well-prepared, attentive teacher, able to take his students’ growth seriously without taking away the element of play and discovery that, for me at least, was essential to theatre.

I believe Eric is one of the best teachers to have as you first step into the world of theatre. Throughout the first year he guided us step by step and at the same time left us free to experiment. He managed to strike a balance between moments of focused work and others of sharing and lightheartedness that personally made me fall in love with it and decide to keep going with acting. What struck me most of all was his complete openness to the ideas that came from us students during class, and his readiness to welcome them and work on them together. This let us stage an end-of-year show we were incredibly proud of: because each of us had had the chance to put something of our own into it, not only as an actor but also in the creative process itself.

As a teacher, Eric passed on to me many ideas that I have tried to put to use both on stage and in everyday life, and above all he brought me to a new awareness of myself, guiding me toward improvement without ever forcing anything, leaving me free to express myself.

I met Eric when he was in one of his first experiences as a theatre teacher and I was in my first year at Scuola Minima. At times you could sense his inexperience, but alongside it I saw right away a quality that to me matters enormously in a teacher: the ability to build a real working group — focused and willing to keep putting itself on the line.

With Eric we rehearsed, rehearsed again, and then rehearsed some more. And the surprising thing is that no one ever seemed to tire of it. There was never the sense of repeating something pointlessly: every new run-through added a quality, a nuance, a possibility we hadn't seen before. You really had the feeling that the work was growing, step by step.