Freeze!

Say you meet a lunatic waving a gun. Handing you a Fringe guide, he says he will kill you unless you recommend a show that contains no postmodern reflections on the nature of art. You leaf through it for a while, then choose Freeze!, which features a Dutchman balancing rocks on top of other rocks. After all, how postmodern could rock-balancing get?

The rocks lie in little piles around a row of five mirrored cubes. Behind the cubes stands Nick Steur, a serious-looking young cairn-artist wearing a headband with a dorky little speaker attached to it. Out of that speaker comes a monologue recorded by Steur himself. He reflects, very slowly and with a certain pained wit, on the nature of performance, the effort to escape from safe zones of thought to riskier territory, and about the purpose of this text - the text we are now listening to. This is the point at which you are gunned down by the lunatic with conventional taste.

At one point Steur says the text only exists to make us appreciate the silence when the recording comes to an end, but that turns out to be a cruel joke: the recording carries on until the performance is complete. It's not clear what the monologue can add to the absorbing, surprisingly stressful experience of watching the rock-balancing itself. This is probably the most impressive live-action rock-balancing act Fest has reviewed.

There was a documentary a while ago about a lens-maker who, using only his hands, can polish a glass ball into a more perfect sphere than any machine. His fingertips sense changes on the atomic level, scientists said. Steur has a similar affinity with physical matter, which we all know can be frustrating stuff to work with. Give him two rocks—any two rocks, doesn't matter which—and this guy will balance them for you. Whether you asked him to or not. Large or small, igneous or sedimentary, doesn't matter. Just give him the damned rocks. Or give him three rocks. Doesn't matter.

He picks up a rock, weighs it meditatively in one hand, and his eyes glaze over. Then his expression changes, and he approaches one of the cubes. Agonising minutes pass as he hefts the rock, divining its centre of gravity. He carefully moves it around on the rock it will be sitting on, looking for just the right point of contact. When he moves his hands away, and the rock stays put, the audience exhales heavily. Stone by stone, a little sculpture rises on each of the five mirrored boxes.

Steur is an impressive rock balancer, but he's no rock-balancing god. The day Fest was in attendance, one of the towers collapsed, shattering the cube it was sitting on. If anything, this moment of violence enhanced the show, breaking up the long period of fretful hush and introducing a sense of risk. Was this the first time such a disaster had occurred?, Fest wondered, not having done its research. (It happens about half the time.) Would Steur lose his mental poise? He didn't: with his serious look and his pedantic headgear, he doesn't look like somebody prone to psychological crises. Not when he has rocks to balance on top of other rocks, anyway.

n.b. although that might look like a three-star rating at the top of this review, it is in fact a stylised representation of three rocks. They were balanced on top of each other but fell over.