The mystery of the coffee-shop meltdown – told by dancers, a drummer and a brown bear

Frauke Requardt and Vivienne Franzmann’s dance-theatre show Anatomy of Survival examines 23 versions of reality in ‘powder keg’ cities

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.