Photo: Jussi Virkkumaa/TEHDAS Teatteri
Co-production, Grus Grus Theatre/Tehdas Teatteri, 20.9.2019
In the beginning there were two (2) people, a man and a woman, and (1) folding rule. When both people have got their own folding rule, conversation begins. Where do you live, is it far? How long does it take to get there? The rules fold to make shapes. Turn left, turn right, around the corner, this much. Rule turns into a clock – tick tock, the pointer moves. Another shape. A bird! No, a plane! Ooh, is it a… fully measured superman?
Full Measures is a performance concerning measuring, performed by Ishmael Falke and Sandrina Lindgren. Knowing their expertise in object theatre of old I was curious to see what their mind over matter approach might accomplish with a bunch of folding rules. I wasn’t disappointed. While the rule is, despite its hinges, rather a stiff object, its barely yielding strictness somehow makes it an appropriate tool for (mainly) visual storytelling about the obsession for measuring and self-tracking. In the hands of Falke and Lindgren it is also visually exciting as the bleak black stage is filled with a world of patterns drawn by yellow zig-zag rules.
Originally intended as a wordless performance, the guest director Idit Herman suggested including words. Sentences spoken in simple, precise English do support the exploration of themes nicely as they highlight the absurdity of extremely precise and all-inclusive measurements and simultaneously add to the quiet humour of the performance.
While the language remains precise, the more obsessed the characters become with measuring, the more baroque the simple stage gets. More and more rules are found and turned into various symbols and shapes, scales, graphs, pointers and interconnected chains until the pair stands in front of a veritable jungle of measures, the beguiling ”Garden of Even”.
The basic question posed by Full Measures is highly topical: is our incessant measuring a way to take control over our lives or is it the measuring that’s taken control? There’s no doubt that measuring has its advantages; it’s good to be aware of distances, shoe sizes or our blood pressure. But when does it get irrational? News seem to tell ever more bizarre tales of attempts to quantify everything in the society, from the productivity of hospitals to the quality of academic research. On individual level, people calculate their daily steps or calorie intake and obsess with the data provided by their activity tracker, which is also expected to inform them whether they’ve slept well or not. Full Measures reminded me of connect-the-dots puzzles made for children. What do we get by connecting all the measurements we’ve made, a wholesome self-portrait or just a hollow, vaguely human-shaped outline?
Measuring has unquestionable political and social implications; one of the folding rule contraptions even made me think of the dark history of measuring, photographs of scientists taking measurements of people’s skulls and facial features to support their pseudoscientific theories on the existence of superior and inferior races. Mostly, though, I was thinking about mental traps and self-imposed prisons of the mind. Nevertheless, Full Measures isn’t dark and gloomy, nor does it preach. Rather it seems to operate on a more personal, everyday level. It is astute but more thought-provoking than derisive, its satire gently humorous.
Living in a country that’s sports crazy and, more lately, apparently obsessed with PISA results, I vaguely expected that the main point in measuring is finding out who’s the fastest, the strongest, the best. Instead, the couple in Full Measures is most eager to scale Mount Average. This was a bit of an epiphany. Indeed, one of the reasons why self-tracking is so devilishly addictive might be that as social beings most people are more concerned with the question ”how do I measure up?” Am I normal, within acceptable parameters? Never mind that ”normal” and ”average” are ultimately as abstract and absurd as any other ideals (or ideal measurements) we hold.
So what happened to the couple in the Garden of Even? Did it provide newfound innocence and bliss? That you must see and decide for yourself. My interpretations may be half-baked, but there are no half measures in this performance. It is delightfully inventive, thought-provoking, visually pleasing and funny, too. With the measured body language of Lindgren and Falke, a plethora of obediently folding rules and the sound and lighting design by Niklas Bertel Nybom and Jarkko Forsman respectively, Full Measures offers an enjoyable evening that’s more than the sum of its parts. There are only a few performances, so check out those dates now!
The Night Owl's Random 