Anatomy Of Survival dance review: Textured and inquisitive
Differences in perspective are scrutinised in this evocative piece from Vivienne Franzmann and Frauke Requardt
When confronted with something we perceive as dangerous (such as a bear) our central nervous systems are wired to either fight, flee or freeze. We’re told this at the start of playwright Vivienne Franzmann and choreographer Frauke Requardt’s deep dive into the emotional psyche, via a brief neuroscience lecture in the style of a corporate video. The only problem, the video explains, is that when we’re run down or under stress even a small emotional mishap can send us into the same state of terror we’d have if we were facing that bear.
This surreal but deeply sensitive piece uses a woman’s meltdown in a coffee shop over a small misreading of social signals as a springboard to examine the poisonous effects of emotional dysregulation. We’re told we will see trauma during the show, but we aren’t given the details of it; there are hints throughout the woman’s meltdown hangover that things in her past have swum up to cause the outburst and make its aftermath more painful. The fact that these are glimpsed but left mysterious is to the piece’s credit. It is interested in how we cope with the burdens we carry, rather than in excavating them.
Delivered by a cast of four, including drummer Stefano Ancora who sets the audience’s nerves jangling with unpredictable beats, the piece imagines 22 different eyewitness perspectives on the coffee shop meltdown (some spoken, some danced), as well as delving into its after-effects. Nostalgic fast-food-worker style costumes, flashes of pastel pink and uncanny 60s dreamy pop all conjure up an idealised, white picket-fence fantasy life, while beneath the surface the spikier undercurrents of human behaviour rumble away. Requardt’s choreography melds energetic Charleston-style riffs with discordant frenetic jerks, and the cast deliver Franzmann’s textured, inquisitive script with bags of empathy. It’s a compassionate look at our emotions, without ever trying to simplify them.
Anatomy Of Survival, Dance Base, until 29 August, 7.45pm; picture: Camilla Greenwell.