One morning, playwright Vivienne Franzmann was queueing for a coffee when an argument broke out. “A customer absolutely lost it,” says Franzmann. “She was demanding her drink, shouting and swearing, and the rest of us stood there not knowing what to do.”
When Franzmann got to the rehearsal studio, she shared the story with Frauke Requardt, a choreographer she had just started working with. “I said, ‘This arsehole started screaming about her coffee.’ I was really appalled.” Requardt had a different response. “She said the woman ‘died a social death’,” recalls Franzmann. As well as being a choreographer, Requardt is a psychotherapist, and she explained what would have been happening in the woman’s nervous system at the time, the famous “fight, flight or freeze” state (the sympathetic nervous system) versus the “rest and digest” state (parasympathetic). Our ability to cope with these fluctuating states is called the “window of tolerance” and that morning in the cafe, the window didn’t just crack, the glass was blown out completely.
Franzmann and Requardt knew straight away this made for the beginnings of a show, and the coffee-shop incident has become the basis for an enjoyable and informative dance-theatre piece, Anatomy of Survival, that the pair have co-created. Alongside a lighthearted psychology lecture, it features the accounts of 23 (fictional) witnesses, who, crucially, all have a completely different take on what happened and who was in the wrong. The text is shot through with jolting cymbal crashes that put the audience into red-alert mode and there are shaking and quaking dances for performers Solène Weinachter, Bea Bidault and Kath Duggan, and, because Requardt’s work is never far from a swerve into the surreal, the unexplained appearance of a large brown bear.
The pair enjoyed digging into research. “One thing therapists really like to do is more training,” says Requardt. “There is just so much to learn about how to deal with the human condition!” Her current training is, appropriately, on nervous system regulation and dysregulation, a trauma-therapy approach called Somatic Experiencing, which involves focusing on internal sensations rather than thoughts in order to modify stress responses. Sounds useful – let’s face it, we’ve probably all had an irrational blow-out from time to time. “Living in a big city, you really see the grind of life,” says Franzmann. “The noise, the bustle, the mess, everyone trying to keep it together financially, practically, maintaining friendships and relationships, emotional pressures, economic pressures … It’s a potential powder keg.”
Requardt mentions road rage as a situation where anger can suddenly escalate and take hold, in a way that’s often disproportionate to the situation. Has she ever lost it in a public place? “Yes, I was never great at queueing,” she admits. “Sometimes it is surprising that it doesn’t happen more often,” she says, going into psychotherapist mode. “My question would be: what happens instead? What are we doing when we are ‘behaving’? Are we yielding, suppressing or pushing an experience to one side or are we actually OK?” Requardt suggests that instead of “taming our experiences”, it’s healthier to engage in a relationship with our emotional responses, and “increase our ability to be with intensity”. Easier said than done, you might be thinking.
One of the key takeaways from the show is the way every witness sees the situation differently. Was the customer provoked, or was she just “crazy”? Was she asking for trouble or did the server deliberately misunderstand her? “One of my interests is the question of what reality actually is,” says Requardt, “and that it’s experienced vastly differently by people.” Our perception of whether another person is harmless or to be feared, or if a situation is benign or dangerous, can be dictated by how switched-on our sympathetic nervous system has got used to being.
We assume our own view of the world is the “real” reality. “It can feel unsettling to allow the idea that someone else’s take is just as true,” says Requardt. Sometimes we might need to allow “the tight version of our own take on reality to loosen enough to let in someone else’s deeply felt reality,” she suggests. “There is always a reason why someone’s behaviour escalates,” Requardt says. “I am yet to meet a person who wants to be really uncontrollably angry.” Not that we shouldn’t be held accountable for our actions, she quickly adds, but if for any reason we didn’t grow up feeling completely safe and secure in our environment and relationships, that can have a huge impact on our ability to ride out stress.
“For me,” says Requardt, “it’s important to understand that if you happen to be an incredibly regulated person who can handle all that life throws at you and stay calm in a crisis, then you got really lucky.”