Brighton Festival: freeze!

Friends Meeting House, Ship Street, Brighton, Monday, May 18 to Wednesday, May 20

GROWING up not far from a riverside, Dutch artist Nick Steur spent hours playing with rocks.

But it was during a holiday on a French beach that he realised the skills he had developed in balance as a child had not left him.

“I kind of rediscovered I had this concentration and skill to put stones on top of each other,” he says. “For two days I was obsessed, looking for more difficult balances and beautiful rocks.”

That experience developed into his touring show Freeze!, which he performs both indoors and outdoors using a range of large and unusual stones he has collected.

“It can take anything between three seconds and 30 minutes to find a balance,” he says. “I don’t have my mind set on a certain balance – it’s like a puzzle. I’m always looking for the right way and what is possible. It’s almost like sparring – if it doesn’t go one way it will go another way.

“A lot of the time afterwards people tell me they saw the moment where I was letting go of the stones.”

For this Brighton show he is asking the audience to bring their own stones for the first time. All contributed stones need to be bigger than the size of a fist.

“The best are hard stones,” he says. “If they are soft they crumble and the points aren’t so thin or beautiful. I ask for bigger stones as the audience needs to be able to see them.

“I always try to do different things in the show because it needs to be fresh and in the moment. “When I bring my own stones it’s harder to make new balances as I know them pretty well.”

He enjoys working with objects so many thousands of years older than him.

“If you touch these monoliths and ancient old stones it feels like you’re looking at the stars,” he says.

“It gives you a humbling feeling. Stones are so much older and more abstract – you’re not deferring to any other stories or images. If you balanced human products like ketchup bottles then the audience would think of French fries.”

And it doesn’t matter if the stones fall during the performance.

“When they are standing on their own and I have taken my hands off them they can do what they want,” he says.

“I’m not reacting any more. When they do fall and break it is a beautiful moment. They speak about destruction, so the show isn’t just about construction.”