From Café Counter to Nervous System in ‘Anatomy of Survival’
- Elspeth Chan
- Oct 4, 2025
- 3 min read
The title Anatomy of Survival hints at a reference to Bessel van der Kolk’s landmark book, The Body Keeps the Score, a foundational work exploring trauma’s effect on the brain’s survival systems and its ripple through body and mind. This connection immediately anchors the audience’s expectations around the interplay of brain, body, and trauma, highlighting that trauma’s reach is both psychological and physical.
The performance opens inside a stylized café, signposted by pink paper cups and matching striped uniforms, with a portable TV at centre stage. Bea Bidault and Solène Weinachter form a duo sitting on the left, Stefano Anacora (the drummer) at the back, while Kath Duggan, the narrator, hovers stage right. The staff uniform suggests the mundanity of a café, yet an abstraction arrives with a quirky educational show on the TV, introducing the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. Jarring sound and lighting cues, such as a drum crack startling the audience upon the mention of “danger” or “dissociation,” and bright flashes triggered by the words “fight-or-flight” — literally engage the audience’s sense of survival. When the focus shifts to the meditative state of the nervous system, enveloping mellow music and soft lights offer an immersive physiological experience that helps the audience feel and understand the body’s response to trauma.
As the story evolves, the focus becomes overly verbal. The duo sings “Baby Eve” to a gentle groove, and the narrator intones, “There’s trauma in this piece,” followed by the elaboration of trauma’s many faces. The performers cycle through twenty-two different “witnesses” to a simple café incident: a misunderstood pumpkin spice latte order of a customer. Although the sixth witness already declares that “the fact doesn’t matter,” underscoring the subjectivity of truth, the succession of perspectives continues through spoken testimony, dance, balloon play, and occasionally baffling speech, making the point long before the sequence ends and demanding considerable focus from the audience.
Throughout the witness’s sharing, glimpses of embodied trauma flicker. One performer traces the outlines of her own body with her hands while her feet tense to the floor, conjuring nervous system pathways. Towards the end of the witness’s sequence, the duo shakes vigorously, sandwiching the narrator. Yet, the piece often remains anchored to the script and narration, and the movement does not fully capture those moments when emotion ‘spills out’ from the nervous system into physicality. Tightening the witness perspectives for a more thematic development in movement would heighten the somatic journey of the audience, accentuating how reconnecting with the body allows buried emotions to surface and be processed.
A notable but smooth transition arrives as the scene metaphorically shifts from external witnesses to the customer’s internal landscape. The drumming grows subtler, the duo’s movements swing outwards, sometimes synchronizing, sometimes suggesting rivalry, diving into the distressed mind of the customer. The image of bear paws and heads signals danger and the monsters inside us all, whilst the monologue in the final scene gently tips the customer’s entangled traumatic mother-daughter relationship over into self-acceptance.
Anatomy of Survival begins and ends in spoken words, weaving from science to emotion. For newcomers to trauma theory, it offers an engaging start; trauma-informed audiences may find it touching and familiar. Movement seekers, however, may long for more embodied storytelling. Still, it offers a thoughtful contemplation of trauma, reminding our reliance on cognitive processing, especially verbalizing what happens around us while neglecting the deeper feelings within. This underscores the need for somatic release, which uncovers the emotions hidden beneath our awareness.
