AustLit

'With Pin Drop, Saulwick cemented her reputation as an acclaimed performance-maker, creating sound-centred works across a variety of mediums - live performance (Pin Drop 2010, PUBLIC 2013, Endings 2015, Permission to Speak 2016); installation (Alter 2014); and audio walks (The Archives Project 2016) - all of which utilise dramaturgies of sound as a key creative feature in both their development and final production. Reviewers particularly noted Saulwick's ability to 'call up your memories of fear or threat',4 making 'the hairs on the back of your neck stand up'5 in 'a tour de force of fear'.6 It was a one-woman performance piece, created collaboratively between Saulwick and Knight and performed by Saulwick herself, supported sonically by a combination of live voice, pre-recorded voices, and live and pre-recorded sounds. Saulwick constructed part of the sound design through the manipulation of objects positioned in close proximity to two microphones and then further manipulated through different sonic processing tools by Knight, who was situated behind the audience at the operator desk. If performance is a summoning of other worlds, as Marvin Carlson has famously asserted,9 both real and imaginary, and for Saulwick, perhaps also worlds of spiritual and deathly import, then Saulwick needs to be understood as part of a neo-Gothic revival.10 Saulwick's mysterious and transfixing sonic innovations challenge orthodox ideas of the single voice in theatre and go far beyond English constructions of the received theatrical voice and the emphasis on the actress who can project up into the gods in the service of a conventional playtext.' (Publication abstract)