Last Updated on 20/08/2024 by Crip Life
Debris Stevenson is a dyslexic writer, Grime poet, hybrid actor and pro-raver. Her upcoming production – My Brother’s a Genius – is set to premiere at the National Youth Theatre as part of its upcoming StoryFest season this August.
Our editor, Emma Purcell, got the opportunity to interview Debris Stevenson about living with dyslexia, becoming a writer and performer and what to expect from her new production.
Debris Stevenson on being neurodivergent
Debris began by opening up about her dyslexia diagnosis and what it was like growing up in a neurotypical world:
“I wasn’t formally diagnosed as dyslexic until I was 21 in my third year of university when they said I had the most serious case of dyslexia they’d ever seen. My mum was very convinced I had dyslexia as a child and in primary school that meant I had a teaching assistant all the time and was often put in bottom sets for things. I remember once I moved up five English sets in five days.
“I found that really stressful, this sense that as a kid, the main message I thought I was receiving was that there was something wrong with me that I couldn’t fix. I remember the teacher assistants were really nice but it really shone a light on everything that I got wrong. Even to this day, I can feel quite embarrassed about getting things wrong in front of people.
“I actually think it’s why I didn’t become a professional dancer sooner. Because I didn’t want to learn the choreography in front of other people. I had to go home and learn it because I was so scared of that kind of public humiliation and failure, which ultimately meant that when I went to secondary school, I just never mentioned I was dyslexic. I just didn’t tell anyone because I didn’t want to go through that again. This is why I didn’t get diagnosed until university.
“After my second year of secondary school, I tried to get diagnosed but by that point, I’d learnt how I learn and was doing quite well academically and at that point, my grades were so good they refused to give me a proper assessment for dyslexia.
“Therefore, I didn’t get one until my final year of university because I was really struggling to keep up with the reading.”
Debris, who also has ADHD, went on to explain how she uses adaptations, support and assistive technology to help with reading and writing:
“So I tend to read on yellow paper if I can, sometimes I wear yellow tinted glasses – I used to have a ruler with a yellow strip, but I lost that.
“I also have my support worker Amelia in the rehearsal room with me, or sometimes a stage manager, tracing where we are on the page on the script with their finger next to me.
“One of the issues I have is that I can’t sightread – I can’t identify where we are on the page. So if I watch or listen, I can look down and they’ll have their finger where we are. So that’s been really useful.
“I use generic dictation software on Apple products at the moment – but we are drawing together more sophisticated systems for that. I’m learning new software, but one of the real exhaustive parts of being neurodivergent is having to learn new software all the time and work out which one works for you. Learning new systems is a real strain and not being paid for that time. But we’re trying.”
Debris Stevenson as an emerging artist
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Next, Debris told us what inspired her to get into the performing arts and writing. She said: “To a degree, it is just who I am. I’ve always very much been the child that if you leave me alone in a room I will make things. I’m sure a large part of that is also down to my mum, who’s also instinctively very creative but also raised us in a very inherently creative way. Even though we didn’t have much money, she would make things and make things with us to play with. I think that really taught me at a young age that I have the power to make things.”
Debris continued: “Then when I got a bit older and I was struggling to read and write, it was grime music being created around me in East London that just really resonated with something inside of me. This embodiment of language, music, words stories and movement – we’re all being creative together at once in the language of the area that I grew up in.
“Then I saw the poet Kayo Chingonyi, who was my friend and went to my church, perform when I was 10 and I thought ‘I want to do that.’ He was a real pivotal person who guided me to The Roundhouse and guided me to poets like Jacob Sam-La Rose and Charlie Dark who really took me under their wing and are central reasons as to why I’m here today.”
When asked which area of the performing arts she enjoys the most, Debris said: “This is the classic anti-ADHD question I often get asked. I’m often asked to choose one of my disciplines but the reality is I don’t see them as separate. I learnt to read and write through grime music, which as far as I’m concerned is poetry.
“The reason I could learn to read and write from it is because it’s fully embodied text. Poetry comes from the body, it comes from mnemonic techniques: rhyme, and rhyme meter, which enable the language to sit in the body, to exist in sound. I refuse to choose I’m sorry, they are all connected, I can’t have one without the other.”
Debris added: “Just to clarify, I call it an anti-ADHD question because it is super common for ADHD people to do and take on many things at once and it’s also super common for dyslexic people that think laterally and it’s common for neurodivergent people to have a hypersensitive nervous system, which often enables us to see these connections where others might not”
Debris had her acting screen debut in Medusa Deluxe at Locarno Film Festival in 2022 and recently played the role of the Narrator in the sell-out concert of Treason The Musical at The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.
Debris shared the love she has for performing on the stage and screen: “Stage and screen are different. I have much more experience on stage than on screen. I’d love to do more work on screen. I’ve found the work I have done super interesting. So I feel a lot more at home on stage and that connection with a live audience is super special.
“But I also grew up watching TV. I didn’t grow up with enough money to go to the theatre, so I’m much more familiar with TV and film as a consumer and have a different kind of connection to that. They’re both equally as interesting, appealing and exciting for me but in really different ways.”
Debris Stevenson’s debut play Poet In Da Corner
The celebrated emerging artist is known for her debut show Poet In Da Corner, which premiered at The Royal Court in 2018, receiving four to five stars and seeing Debris nominated for an Emerging Talent of The Year Award (Evening Standard Theatre Awards). Poet In Da Corner, Dizzee Rascal’s seminal album, toured the UK in early 2020 alongside the release of an album.
Debris explained more about this project and what it was like collaborating with the award-winning rap artist Dizzee Rascal:
“Poet In Da Corner was my first play and when I started it came from a very strong why. Grime had taught me to read and write and I was teaching at Nottingham University in 2011/2013. So grime was in its resurgence and it was really in the media and being criticised for being associated with crime, gangs and a lot of the other racist troupes being one-dimensionally imposed onto Black genres of music in Britain, very unfairly I think.
“This genre of music had taught me to read and write and had taught me more than any of my degrees ever had. I loved my degrees – I had an amazing time on my BA and MA – but grime was more important. Grime was more foundation. It taught me entrepreneurialism, it gave me a community, It gave me a language to articulate my life and it was being attacked.
“I felt I was in a place of privilege to leverage, to change some of that narrative. I’m sure some of that is because I am white and I wanted to leverage some of that unfair privilege that I’m given to change some of that story and to also give access to funds and other projects for the people I grew up around to make their own work.
“The analogy I use is I felt that my foot was in the door of the room that all the money was in. It’s unfair the reasons my foot is in this door, but that doesn’t mean I should pull my foot out of the door, I should come in bring everyone with me and pull the room apart was kind of the agenda. It was to canonise grime the same way that Shakespeare and Byron are canonised, As a genre that inspired an otherwise disenfranchised group of people to dedicate their lives to words.
“At first it was just canonising Boy in da Corner, taking Dizzee Rascal’s album and treating it like it was Shakespeare, let me analyse it, let me look at what the metric scheme is, the rhyming scheme is. Then I would collaborate with a grime producer and a grime MC to recreate our own version of that poetic form that Dizzee Rascal had created.
“I did several different shows playing around with our versions, working with different MCs and grime poets. I invited the Royal Court to one of those shows and then it got picked up by the Royal Court and got turned into a semi-autobiographical play inspired by my life and that endeavour.
“The structure remains, there are many tracks in that show, and you know which ones they are because they have Dizzee’s original title in it and retain the form of Dizzee’s work. There are also a lot of Shakespearean sonnets just to riff off of that exploration.
“We did work with Dizzee and his team on the project and they were really supportive and he came to see the show, which was incredible and to this day was one of the highlights of my life to have my hero come and see that piece of work.”
Debris Stephenson as founder of The Mouthy Poets
Debris founded and artistically directed The Mouthy Poets, a community interest company, for six years. She raised over £300,000 to develop young talent. She has worked in over 30 countries, designed foundation performance poetry modules at Nottingham University, and had her debut poetry pamphlet, Pigeon Party, published by Flipped Eye.
Debris told us more about The Mouthy Poets: “It’s a poetry collective that I started when I was 19 in Nottingham. It taught creative writing, performance and event coordination as life skills. We had a central collective of 50 young people that would constantly be evolving and we would train those young people to do performances and create their own shows.
“We also created a sister company or a cousin collective called Lion Mouth in Germany. We also trained people to be teachers. We did loads of different programmes.
“The central principle was learning to write, perform, and curate, skills that can help you in life. Lots of professional artists came out of that programme, which I’m really proud of, and lots of other professional endeavours, publishing houses, other collectives and initiatives came out of that programme.
“But also people just got jobs where previously they might have struggled, they might have improved their relationship with their parents or improved their mental health. We had an amazing therapist as part of our company called Nicky Disney. I had an incredible team that helped me run Mouthy Poets over those six years, many of whom are still operating in Nottingham and beyond.”
Debris Stevenson’s new production My Brother’s a Genius
Debris’ new piece – My Brother’s a Genius – is written from her personal experience, following the narrative of two neurodivergent siblings.
In this story, they’re learning to fly. In Debris’ own experience, she speaks to her own experiences with her and her brother being neurodivergent and how you pursue your own paths and life when your brother is hugely successful as a result.
My Brother’s a Genius is being developed with a group of neurodivergent National Youth Theatre (NYT) members in association with Stanley Arts and will have its premiere at the home of NYT in Finsbury Park in August.
Debris explained how she came up with the idea for the show and what it is like working with young Neurodivergent performers:
“I was having a chat with Paul Roseby, the Artistic Director of NYT. I worked on NYT’s Much Ado About Nothing with Josie Daxter, who is also the director of this project. I was talking about my real-life brother who is a real-life genius, which is the only part of the play that is factually accurate. I wanted to do something that came from a very true place but was entirely fictional and this felt like a great project to do
They gave me the seed commission last year. We shared a bit of it with some actors from NYT in February and that went incredibly well so they wanted to do a further development of the show and that is what we are sharing at StoryFest, which is by and large a whole first draft of the script.”
Debis continued to share what it’s like working with a neurodivergent cast of people: “What’s been really enjoyable is trying to create a really inherently collaborative space, understanding everyone is trying their best and we don’t need to mask. If you need to step out, you can step out. We’re communicating with each other.
“I’ve been doing a lot of access work and access consultancy and though there are really important black and white things that you can do for access like have a ramp, have a chill-out space, have a quiet corner, have ear defenders, have fidget toys, and we had as many of those in the space as we could have. But the reality is sometimes things clash in the space and what I found is a real central place to work from is that we’re in this together. We’re collaborating, we’re negotiating and if you need to leave, thank you for asking for that.
“I think a lot of neurodivergent people have found that by asking for what we need, we have been reacted to in the past like a nuisance, rude or impolite and we hold a lot of shame and we really push down those requirements and it hurts.
“That honesty has been deeply moving and I’ve really been struggling to work out how I can unmask and honestly navigate a world that I have been masking and navigating dishonestly for 34 years. So to have a group of people much younger than me, to see them unmask and feel encouraged to unmask has felt really liberating, joyful and precious and there have been days where I’ve felt I haven’t wanted to leave because it’s been like just a safe cosy chill out corner in what can be quite a loud tiring world.”
Debris shared more about what we can expect from her new production My Brother’s a Genius:
“This is the second work-in-progress show of My Brother’s a Genius. We’ve got two shows on the 1st and 17th August as part of StoryFest, which is a whole festival full of amazing work that’s being developed at the National Youth Theatre, which you should definitely go and check out.
“We’ve had eight days of development that’s led to this version of the show that exists. It’s like a combination of a drill musical, meets nursery rhymes, meets Roald Dahl, in a kind of neurodivergent mash-up medley.
“It’s fun, it’s funny, it’s hard and it hurts sometimes but we find each other and it’s about finding yourself and finding each other – finding your siblings, the real ones in the literal meaning of the show but also the figurative ones in the making of the show.
“As we’re constantly finding ourselves and each other – it’s been a really collaborative process and I want this show to be as much as radicalising form and process and if you want to radicalise product, you have to start with the process. I want to look at how we neuroqueer process together. It’s a really fun-loving story about neurodivergent twins learning how to fly figuratively and literally.”
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Neurodiversity in the performing arts
Lastly, Debris gives her advice to other neurodivergent and disabled people considering joining the performing arts:
“I would say talk to people, communicate with people, build a tribe, be honest about the things that you’re struggling with. Some people will not receive that kindly, but other people will, and keep those people because those people will have your back forever.
“There’s a whole lot of people who will not be very helpful. Try not to let them discourage you because there are just so many people who will move heaven and earth to enable your vision, this is what I’ve found because you’re not alone.
“Such a large percentage of the population is disabled and invisible and not being supported and that’s horrendous but what I’ve learnt about that injustice is those experiencing it or empathising with it will really do everything they can to help. Get the resources you can get.
“And finally, I’d say at the centre of this project I wanted to follow the things the world had told me I should fight, and by that I mean there are so many things around my disability that I’m ashamed of and that I thought I needed to overcome.
“Don’t get me wrong, there’s a whole lot to overcome. I don’t want to feed into the hero narrative of disability of like ‘Oh it’s my superpower’. Some people might feel that way and that’s great and some days I feel like that but it is also still a disability and there’s days when it’s really heavy and it’s really hard.”
My Brother’s a Genius will be performed at the National Youth Theatre as part of the StoryFest season on Thursday 1st August and Saturday, 17th August 2024. You can book tickets at www.ticketsource.co.uk
You can find out more about Debris Stevenson by following her on Instagram.
You can also check out Emma Purcell’s guest post at the National Youth Theatre – Escapism On Stage: A Disabled Women’s Journey Through The World Of Inclusive Theatre
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