We keep our doors locked most of the time. We have Neighbourhood Watch and the television is riddled with reality police shows and crime dramas. Fear is imbedded in our lives subtly and for many who have been in a dire situation, less so. In Pin Drop Tamara Saulwick explores into the idea of fear and physical threat.
Pin Drop is not about violence or horrifying situations as such, but more about the mind and body responses to the idea of threat regardless of circumstances. What would you do in a situation of home invasion? How do deal with walking alone at night? Being followed down a street would you freeze up or get angry?
Pin Drop shares the voices of eleven women. Saulwick interviewed people ranging in age, from six to ninety-two, about their experiences and feelings, and then whittled the recorded material down to a collection of personal stories that overlap in some ways. In shuffling and manipulating the audio material, taking on the voice and mannerisms of her subjects, Saulwick captures the humour and terror in the narratives using the relationship between movement and sound to create an overarching score of unease.
A woman describes her intricate get away plan if someone were to enter the house. Another has slept with earplugs in only to wake with a man desperately trying to get into her room from the balcony through the glass sliding door. Another woman describes her mighty adrenaline response to a home invasion.
The carefully chosen anecdotes lull the audience into a false sense of security at times: some are funny, but many of them are plain frightening. Saulwick transforms vocally and physically, finding an effortless strength throughout. Her performance is grounded and her presence, impressive. Vocally she fades in and out of the original interview recordings and Peter Knight’s sound design is as much a presence onstage as Saulwick. Together she and Knight make a sort of magic that immerses all the senses. Ben Cobham’s lighting design is flawless, working to create visual fragments. The result: a further heightening of the senses.
Some of the sound is created live: Saulwick uses everyday objects—sticky tape, a lock, scissors, a zipper. She toys with them close to a microphone so every nuance is captured, sharp and vivid, like the heightened sense of hearing one might experience when afraid in the dark. She wears ear buds to deal with audio cues and there is a clever moment where she removes them and runs them over a microphone. We hear parts of another woman’s story as though the woman’s voice might be the one in our heads.
Pin Drop creates waves of suspense and intrigue. And at the end you’re left still on edge, wanting to know what happened to the woman in the strip joint in Belgium, and did they nab the man in the other lady’s cupboard? There is no sense of closure — that’s not the point. The stories have been clipped short, the endings might have been happy but they’re insignificant here. It’s the moments of threat, real or imagined, and the feeling around them that is Saulwick’s focus and she maintains it. For this, Pin Drop packs a visceral punch and leaves behind echoes: the audience telling their own stories in the foyer later.
What: Pin Drop
Creator/Performer: Tamara Saulwick
Playing at: Arsthouse, North Melbourne Town Hall. 25 – 29 August 2010.
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