As a teenager who once dreamed of becoming insanely wealthy for the sole purpose of returning to the village where I grew up and buying the entire place only to turn it into the world’s largest maggot farm, there is plenty which rings true about tonight’s show. Writer/performer Molly Naylor and musician Iain Ross (from the band Bearsuit)  have created a storytelling show, with songs, that highlights how the choices and attitudes of our teenage self have shaped the person we are now, both in what we have stuck to and the things we have abandoned. The entire show is suffused with teenage difficulty and intensity: it is earnest, awkward, cynical, vulnerable and precocious. This bleeds through into the structure, performance and rhythm of the piece.

Iain Ross is avowedly non-theatrical yet he possesses an admirable dead-pan and a great sense of timing when it comes to undercutting Naylor’s excesses or evasions, who in turn carries us with her honesty and humour. The musical elements of the show work to separate the twin narratives (real adult and fictional teenager), heightening the emotional impact of the material they frame. At times I felt that these songs could have been performed in a more unabashed manner, capturing defiance and commitment above diffident awkwardness. Mostly this was a question of volume and drive on the vocals. I had a nagging feeling that the implied conclusions of the show were just a little too generalised to ring fully true, perhaps a mark of my own cynicism or the knockabout feeling of emotional shorthand in the adult sections, a kind of ‘you know what I mean’ style of play. But there is plenty to be joyously delighted in: bad parties, sauna heroics, Facebook sadism and genuine friendship.

One of the central themes is the conflict between idealism and cynicism. In this regard a certain anthemic pop-rock standard becomes a potent symbol of unredeemed commitment and candour and is all the better for being fully played with. We are asked to examine why we think what we think. Are we just parroting the badly constructed philosophy we fell into aged sixteen, or have we in fact turned away from what we should be and entered into the mendacious pact of adulthood where we swap honesty for advantage? There is also a strand about how we define others by their roles in relation to us, and how unnerving it can be when those people turn out to be just as human and shifting as ourselves. This is a playful and funny show about an almost universally terrible time in our lives which captures the passion, hope and fear that lies behind it.

In The Future Show Deborah Pearson tells us how things are going to be, for her, for us, from this moment until she thinks her last thought. Imagine how it would be to know the future.  This knowledge would create a terrible lock, trapping you inside yourself in each specific moment of now-ness, fully aware of what is to come, unable to do anything about it. I felt like the walls of an iron prison were closing in on my mind, and the show didn’t seem to be without cost to its creator.

Deborah is great performer, someone with sensitivity and the ability to balance an audience on the edge of a narrative knife. Here simply sitting, reading a text prepared specially for this show, as it must be for every performance, there is fragile poetry and subtlety in her voice. It carries you through deep digressions into the details of individual moments and out into the vast, only partly documented, future of her life. I found myself wishing for more contact from her during the reading but that is just not the nature of this piece.

The text is incredible, mixing a perfect miniature portrait of the location it is happening in and the experience of its performer after it is over. The images and stories are vivid and immediate, sharing the qualities of a practised diarist, dramatist and poet. The writing and the tone of its delivery captures the feeling of memory, so we imagine the events and feelings described have already happened and are simply being recalled rather than fabricated.  Happiness, love and humour blend with profound anxiety and self destruction. There are beautiful comic constructions within the flow of the story, just as there are sections which feel like a kind of cold-reading, a presentation of what we would like to imagine our lives to be. Through all this there is a powerful sense of the weight of time on a person.

It becomes a show about the self as story and the story of self: we become what we tell ourselves we will be. Life is a narrative we make up, largely without considering how we relate to our future self as we are slowly turning into them. There is a kind of crushing force created by the recursion of bringing the literal details of the future into the present. As if living in a constant state of déjà vu or a kind of whirlpool of experience, a vortex which exposes the final smallness of the self, dragging audience and performer into a singularity where all time happens at once and ultimately continues without us.

Hannah Sullivan has been collecting the way people dance. Looking and logging individual attitudes and details, storing them away to put into her show. In the way you dance is both a revealed intention and a great deal which you unintentionally reveal. We get to watch Hannah snap between portrayals or gradually find the next dance, and each time we see an almost-complete character: suggestive, sexual, introverted, absurd, mystical, abandoned, wild, and controlled. Arms that flail or are held tight, and the eyes open or closed, tells us more than the dancer knows.

These physical vignettes have been lifted out of the crowd, out of context, and presented to a selection of excellent songs they evoke the question of what it is to be seen by another, how we define or describe our relationships through movement. The gap between the dance culture of a much older generation hints at a lost structure to dance. You had to learn how to dance, you expressed yourself within a prescribed form, rather than wigging out like a flailing maniac (my preferred approach on the dance floor) and there is a tenderness to the way we can visit that lost world of formality.

There are a few sections where the images didn’t speak as clearly or vividly as in others, sometimes Sullivan lost contact with the audience or her own breath giving a stilted feeling that might have been smoothed with a fuller presence. I had the feeling that the show skimmed along the surface of its potential and I wanted Sullivan to dive deeper in the way she played certain sections, which is nothing more than committing fully to the ideas or emotions she was presenting. There are some great comic moments both in the dances and the material which comprises the majority of the second half.

There is a shift half way through the show from looking at others, to her own relationship to music and the way that dance so clearly revealed the relationships of her parents. The way people dance with each other tells a story: perhaps they are dancing towards one another or perhaps they are separated, in the same room. There is plenty of humour and pathos in the work and it speaks of Sullivan’s desire to observe and express the world she sees around her.

This is a delicate and evocative audio journey which takes us through Bristol Central Library on a search for Ariel, the subject of a series of photos found and fallen in love with by artist Tatton-Brown in an antiques shop. The language is imagistic and associative and the narrator has a charming warmth of tone, hinting at intimacy, mystery, and pleasure. The effect of the headphones in an already quiet environment creates a pleasant distance between us and the physical world.

The work is suffused with the poetry of another age, a lost elegance and simplicity. We see love as a life’s work and the artist’s own search for connection and communication through the fragile traces of a life seen through physical fragments, official documents, and the memories of others. What might have been ephemeral becomes central and we are lead towards an understanding of a couple who might otherwise have never existed for us.

The library itself is a potent character in the piece, we see obsolete pulley systems, secret dusty archives. There is a sense that something living has passed into obscurity as the knowledge accumulated in those books sits passively, paint cracks and wooden stairs creak beneath us. A few details need more attention: the moment of revelation where we see the images that inspired the piece is hampered slightly by their small size, albeit on a delightfully presented screen. I was hungry to see the detail of faces and gestures but it wasn’t easy enough here. In a piece where every interaction has been so carefully considered these details stand out, just as the actor’s shirt being crumpled felt disappointing.

I was profoundly moved by the final section where we glimpse the ideals of the creator of those photos. This is a show about love made with love. A re-discovery of and search for a powerful connection which once existed and is now reborn for us.

A completely unique show based around a singular talent, Freeze! crackles into being around a man on his knees balancing rocks on top of each other while his voice, purposefully slow, floats out to us from a speaker, a distraction talking about distractions.

The stones rest on large boxes made from mirrored glass, heightening the stakes and reminding us of the potential destructive cost and violence of failure. You see, the performer isn’t just resting rocks upon each other in a sensible, almost natural way, like you might see in the cairn pillars of artist Andy Goldsworthy, instead they are balanced to defy both gravity and possibility.

All Steur does is put rocks on top of each other and within this minimalism there is rich complexity: we see the time and precision required by each creation, a transition from active imbalance towards a resounding sturdiness, the rock’s stillness seeming to resonate out in the space. I found myself laughing at just how absurd it was that these stones could stay in place like that, resting on point. They come to function as both sculpture and performance document, each adopting an almost-human personality rife with idiosyncrasy.

The text serves as a counterpoint, where the actions are concrete and based on concentrated, meditative effort, the text is intangible and full of digression and mistakes. I got a sense of how everything you do is based on impossibly vulnerable circumstances which might collapse at any moment, where the risk of failure threatens to destroy the foundations of everything you have built. I found the work utterly delightful and spent the majority of the performance with my mouth open in amazement.