Dean Tsang is a critically acclaimed spokenword artist based in Edinburgh who has colour-coded and rated his day out of ten, every single day, since 2019. Receiving a diagnosis of a heart condition in his 20s – and all the tests that come with that – prompted a fresh examination of all the ways we measure our existence. The resulting trilogy of spokenword shows, Our Anxious Measurements, is deeply philosophical and brilliantly playful. SNACK spoke to Tsang about the processes behind these experimental performances.
What made you start rating each day out of ten?
Every year, I like to commit myself to a wee project, see where it takes me. I saw on Reddit that people had rated their days as good, excellent, bad, etc. I thought, what’s my life actually like? After the first year was done, I was so intrigued about what next year might look like. It felt really good to reflect, and it grounded me. Whenever I’m like, what have I done with my life?, or whenever I’m doubting very much what’s happened in the past few months, I can say, in an objective sense, here are the days that scored an eight. A lot of good stuff did happen.
Have you come up with your own rubric or metric as to what makes it a two out of ten, or ten out of ten day?
There’s a lot of debate about what makes a good day. Is it, for example, a day where you do a lot? Is it a day where you feel a lot and you think that you’ve grown emotionally from it? For me, a ten is a threshold, how good a day can be – it doesn’t have to be perfect.
A two is usually something that is catastrophically bad. It’s interesting, though, because days that I thought were horrendous still score a two rather than a one or a zero. I hope I don’t have to ever score a day that scores as an actual zero. I think that would be black, like a void.
You could experience two of the same day, and the scores could be different, and that’s valid too – you might be in a different space when you experience the same days. Even the tiniest thing can influence the outcome, as well. If someone that you’ve not spoken to in a while drops a message, that can knock it up by one. It’s the small things that can really have an impact.
That’s beautiful. There are concepts that are difficult to quantify, like happiness, relationships, art. How do you feel about the proxies that we come up with to try and measure these in cold, hard numbers?
Some measurements are very easy. If you exercise regularly, that’s an easier thing to use as evidence, than, for example, the measurement of hope itself. When I asked people what their definition of hope is, there was no uniform answer, and that’s in itself an interesting question. The measurement should promote a dialogue. Some things are unknown and some things are incredibly difficult to measure. It’s interesting to raise the question as much as it is to answer it.
Tell us more about the three sets of the Our Anxious Measurements trilogy that you’re bringing to Edinburgh this year.
The first set is a wheel of poems which is spun to determine the order of the set. The idea came to me while I was at A&E for my heart condition, atrial fibrillation. I was getting my bloods taken, and I thought to myself, I measure so much about my life – what have I done in my 20s? I can make a poetry set about that.
Let’s put it on a wheel, to lose that control as well. What poets love in spoken word is having control over the flow of their set. They get to determine the peaks and troughs, and that gives them the power. To remove that sense of control, to question if it’s okay to lose it, that’s where Our Anxious Measurements came in.
The second one talks about the search for one measurement that will completely tell you that you are enough as a human being. That came to me after I finished the first set: there’s so many conventional measurements I hadn’t covered, so I was like, let’s make it a search, let’s make it a journey. The final set is about: what is the response to anxiety? How do you get around it? Can you go through it? Is it immovable? Is it impossible? With this one I’m using a series of dice to measure the probability of things.
Your show is spoken word. What does that look like for you?
My style comes from hip hop. My style is very rhythmic – it can be bombastically so, as well. A lot of the measurements are conceptual, delivered in a way that is heavily image-oriented, very heavily rhythmic as well. There are poems where even syllables themselves are broken apart.
Instead of it being one big story, which spokenword sets can be, it tends to be an anthology of different metrics, which collectively create a volume of work that hopefully leaves the audience having loads of questions, loads of reassurance that they’re not on their own.
Our Anxious Measurements I, II and III are across various dates, times, and Edinburgh venues as part of PBH’s Free Fringe programme
Main Photo Credit Gilad Zinman
