Belong To Me

When Sarah Collins strides on stage to play the 'lead' in Choir Girl she will be continuing a fine family tradition of group singing. “My grandmother was in a choir for 65 years,” she announces.

However, as Collins soon reveals, the dark underbelly of the choir scene ultimately threatened to kill off the family's commitment. “This new director took over and she didn't like the way he did things, so she quit. Anyway, she got all these bitchy comments about it. It was like bullying the elderly.”

As a storytelling solo performer and comic, Collins has made herself a name nationally as one of the “top ten next big things”, but for this year's Melbourne Fringe she is going back to her chorister roots for inspiration. Choir Girl features Collins and a fourteen member, all-girl choir on a dark comic journey into the heart of the song and the need for belonging.

To illustrate the idea, she recounts, “I was in this choir in Brisbane and there was this really small woman there, I thought maybe she had an eating disorder; but anyway I used to drive her home after and she lived in this big rambling mansion all by herself. I'd watch her go inside and see the lights come on and I was kinda fascinated. So yeah, the show is partly based on her.”

Her character in the show is clearly looking for some kind of community to belong to and in the choir scene she finds something worth striving for. “Love basically,” Collins says. “She has this thing for the accompanist; but she's pretty deluded and so in her head it becomes this incredible unrequited obsession.”

Although normally a solo artist, Collins has teamed up with Green Room nominee theatre company Attic Erratic to help bring Choir Girl to fruition. Cue award-winning director Celeste Cody has helped to give the fourteen strong choir a stronger symbolic presence. “Just like the choir in Greek tragedy or comedy they sometimes support her and sometimes oppose her, so in that way they are like the voices in her [Sarah's] head,” she explains.

According to Cody there is an unmistakably psychological drama unfolding throughout the show, one in which the main character unfurls an inner world of abiding loneliness. “It's definitely more like dark comedy than anything else,” she notes. “Even the songs sorta signify states of mind; y'know, when she's being real but also when she's being delusional.”

Sarah Collins colours the point in, “It's Hitchcockian. Y'know, it's got that creepy feel to it. Even when it's funny you might sorta think, 'Should I really be laughing at that?'”

Driven along by Collins' signature storytelling style and punctuated with a catalogue of hit tunes, (including Britney's Baby, One More Time), Choir Girl merges stand-up, group singing and psycho-drama into one self-deluded concert.

At its heart it also says something about choirs and their unexpected re-emergence. “People like them because it's community,” Collins concludes. “Y'know, we don't really have that much anymore. There used to be church but I barely know anyone who goes to church now. So y'know, choirs are a really good way to create some kinda belonging.”