DRIP
nytheatre.com review by Saviana Stanescu
August 15, 2003
It was a great pleasure to see
Drip, conceived and created by Attic People, an ensemble founded by
nine performers from five different countries who trained together at
the Ecole Internationale de Theatre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. The
underlying principle in the pedagogy of Jacques Lecoq is the idea of the
poetic body and the belief that everything moves, and everything can be
translated into movement, even inanimate objects like a sugar cube or a
piece of glass. Lecoq created a physical theatrical vocabulary and
movement technique that allows performers to develop their own voice and
theatrical language. Drip is Attic People’s first full-length piece of physical theatre and was developed through a series of improvisation workshops held in Paris in 2002, exploring the ways of combining comic chorus work with storytelling. The result is a hilarious story of a community of people crammed into a block of flats and their everyday routines. The situation is pushed to grotesque extremes as the seven actors portray specific archetypes: the dictatorial leader, the curious and nasty old woman, the frustrated fat girl, the macho no-brain/yes-muscles man, the sexy, fashionable big-breasted lady (the story’s "bad guys"), and the innocent girl and boy falling in love with each other despite the fact they cannot understand each other’s language (the hero/heroine).
The "Big Goal" of the Cracker Valley community is to win a competition of water-savings. No sacrifice is too small for achieving this communal golden dream: people stop drinking water and taking showers although the weather is hot, and start spying on each other to see who doesn’t obey the rules. Ben (Max Dana) is the rebel of the block, the water-strike breaker, who cannot give up his very enjoyable baths. He falls in love with Lisa (Tatiana Bogucz), the niece (visiting from Berlin) of the block’s administrator. They engage in a Romeo & Juliet-like relationship, swimming in their love and dreams.
It’s amazing what Attic People do with a set consisting of one table that, turned in various positions, becomes a block with chalk-drawn windows, a bathtub, a staircase, etc. Their bodies in movement, the sounds they generate imitating the water or the opening of a door, and the few lines of the narrative, are enough for these masterful performers to create a wacky world and entice us into it. Drip is an imaginative and skillfully interpreted piece of theatre that shouldn’t be missed by any theatergoer fascinated with the power and poetry of the human body in performance.
