Pin Drop
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Pin Drop

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No matter whether these threats are real or imagined, our response is nonetheless bona fide – that most primal human emotion, fear. It has the power to set our knees knocking, our palms sweating and sharpen our every sense, as keen as the switchblade you’re convinced that stranger is wielding. Keen enough that you could even hear a pin drop. Thus is the premise of Tamara Saulwick’s one-woman show, Pin Drop, which will begin its season at the Malthouse Theatre on July 26. Back by popular demand after a short run at the Arts House last year, the show received four Green Room Nominations in 2010 and took out the award for Outstanding Production (Independent and Hybrid Performance).

What fascinates Saulwick about fear is not the impetus, but rather the variety of often-unpredictable ways that people may react in the face of terror. We may turn into gallant warriors. Or, as Saulwick herself discovered, our bodies may betray us. When she was living in a share house during her early 20s, Saulwick heard what she presumed to be an intruder forcing their way into the attic. “I thought, ‘Oh my god, this is it!'” she recalls. “‘Something horrific is about to happen to me!’.”

It turns out it was just a drunken friend of her housemate’s, bringing a girl home to what he thought was an empty house. But despite this benign revelation, the experience has long resonated with Saulwick. “The thing that struck me was that I didn’t respond how I thought I would. My body fell apart on me. I completely went to jelly. I was a young woman at the time, and I had always thought that if I found myself in a dangerous situation I’d just kind of turn into superwoman,” she laughs.

Pin Drop combines a mixture of theatre, movement and music – a style that Saulwick simply terms “contemporary performance”. She initially trained as a dancer before moving into theatre, and has since worked with such diverse groups as Not Yet It’s Difficult, Born in a Taxi and Strange Fruit, amongst others. “It’s always been very natural for me to think across those disciplines,” explains Saulwick, “because when you study across them then they’re just all part of your language.” Pin Drop is her third original work, after map folding for beginners in 2001 and Imprint in 2005.

The show centres upon a series of interviews that Saulwick recorded with participants ranging from age six to 92. Working closely with composer and sound designer Peter Knight, together they have created an intricate soundscape that integrates eleven of these dialogues. Saulwick then bought in choreographer Michelle Heaven to assist with movement, and lastly lighting design team Blue Bottle. Lighting too plays a crucial role, experimenting with extremes of very low light and, at times, pitch-blackness. Pin Drop‘s exploration of fear thus becomes not only thematic, but also sensorial and experiential for the audience.

Saulwick explains that the openness of the work (which does not follow a traditional narrative structure per se) creates space for the spectator’s emotions or memories to be triggered. And as testament to the universality of fear, Saulwick found that people’s responses when the show was staged last year were overwhelming.

“There were people just hanging out in the foyer each night and telling each other these stories of things that had happened to them. Audience members were coming up to me and saying, ‘I have to tell you! I have to tell you about what happened to me when I went to such and such…’ This sharing of stories was, for me, probably the most satisfying part of the performance.”