Pumpkin Spiced Rashomon

Recently, I came across a video of a woman having a meltdown at an American Football game. The details are unclear of what exactly went down, but the short clip of this young woman screaming ‘fuck off!’ to the person filming her while being restrained by her parents has garnered millions of views and thousands of derisive comments. That young woman’s one moment of dysregulation has been locked in time. Disseminated for the world to see, along with her name and the university she studies at—the internet is full of detectives.

Performance

“Anatomy of Survival” by Frauke Requardt and Vivienne Franzmann

Place

The Place, London, UK, September24, 2025

Words

Eoin Fenton

“Anatomy of Survival” by Frauke Requardt and Vivienne Franzmann. Photograph by Camilla Greenwell

In the post-Karen age we are increasingly witnesses to the bat-shit meltdowns and shrieked obscenities of people far beyond our locale. Each person with a smartphone is free to record and air people behaving badly, or alternatively, give their two cents on whatever public spat they come across. But where do these people come from? Why do they snap the way they do? Choreographer Frauke Requardt and playwright Vivienne Franzmann’s canny work of dance theatre “Anatomy of Survival,” commissioned and co-produced by the Place and the Royal Court, gives a platform to these petulant ones.

The work starts with an infomercial of sorts. A soft-spoken lady on screen informs us of our primal mammalian responses to danger and discomfort: fight, flight, and freeze. Like it or not, our bodies have not yet adapted past our hunter-gatherer response system to threat. For some, we learn, the bandwidth of tolerance is narrower than others, leading to dysregulation and potential outbursts. Got it? Good.

The action on stage begins with a sensitivity training demonstration. Actress Kath Duggan prompts dancers Bea Bidault and Solène Weinachter to enact a scene in a café: Woman A asks what flavours of coffee they have, Woman B responds ‘coffee’, Woman A takes offence and things begin to descend into a full on tirade from the affronted customer. What we see next are the testimonies of the twenty or so witnesses to this crime of composure, played out by the three ladies to the meter of percussionist Stefano Ancora’s drum kit.

“Anatomy of Survival” by Frauke Requardt and Vivienne Franzmann. Photograph by Camilla Greenwell

Each testimonial is wildly different. Some are sympathetic to the screaming woman: ‘I decided to give her my kind eyes’ says Weinachter, scanning the auditorium as the house lights go up, locking eyes with individuals in the crowd, confronting us with a benevolent nod and fawning grin to snorts of laughter. One witness discloses that they would turn to violence against the smarmy barista, another claims she could sense the barista’s distress from the employee room as she retreated from the onslaught—Bidault and Weinachter lick their paws like pitiable kittens. Throughout, the dancers alternately boogie to the playful drumbeats, arms and hair whipping about, or twitch anxiously. Everyone speaks of what they would or could have done, what they wanted to say, what they really thought. Nobody intervenes.

These snippets, both danced and acted out, are oftentimes hilarious musings on the bystander effect but also highlight how our recollections of moments like these often become reimaginings, filled with liberties and bias. As we hear the testimony of the shouting woman herself, things begin to take a darker turn. Requardt’s movement, once quirky and casual, is now uncanny and wild. Bidault and Weinachter tremble before breaking loose like wild marionettes, swiping at each other capoeira-style to Ancora’s pounding drums. Duggan screams until blue in the face, “where is your customer service? Where is your fucking customer service!?” before storming off.

“Anatomy of Survival” by Frauke Requardt and Vivienne Franzmann. Photograph by Camilla Greenwell

Here is where Franzmann’s writing illuminates the work into a thrilling piece of sensory overload. Duggan, still as the shouting woman, takes hold of the mic, talking through every minute detail of a day where everything went wrong: her strained interactions with her frosty mother (played by Weinachter in a bear mask), a run in with an old schoolmate in the toothpaste aisle, her awkward attempt at rescuing a duckling which leaves her soaked in pond water. She is a creature so overwhelmed by the world around her, the dizzying choices of toothpastes and voyeuristic eyes of people on the street, that she begins to suffocate in panic. Though she has hurled abuse at the barista, we cannot help but feel her hopeless dread as she desperately thinks of ways to reset her life after fleeing the café.

Though running for only an hour, Anatomy of Survival manages to bring us on a total sensory rollercoaster. This thrilling little gesamtkunstwerk not only informs us of the fragility of our nervous systems, but prompts us to interrogate our thoughts on the people around us: Why does this person act this way? Why is that man so standoffish? What makes an already upset woman totally lose the run of herself when someone films her at a football game? Perhaps if we carried with us this understanding that we are creatures equipped with a nervous system that is, as the programme puts it, “stuck in the Stone Age,” we might sooner become compassionate mediators rather than idle spectators.

Eoin Fenton

Eoin (they/he) is a dance maker and writer based in Cork (Rep. of Ireland), and London (UK). They have danced across Ireland and London in venues including The Place, Project Arts Centre Dublin and Galway Cathedral. Eoin graduated with a BA in Choreography from Middlesex University in 2024 and began writing as part of the Resolution Reviews programme. They are a regular contributor to A Young(ish) Perspective.

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