Since early May, something special has been happening. Alternative Voices Theatre Company now has its own online space for weekly sessions. The first session took place on 5 May 2026, with eight neurodivergent adults joining us online. The session was run by myself Madeleine Levy and Lily Smith supported me with technology. When I first applied to Arts Council England people started to say to me “this sounds like a separate project.” I disagreed with that all the way through and the reason being was that you cannot teach theatre venues how to support Neurodivergent artists without also providing opportunities for Neurodivergent artists and these sessions have proved to me exactly that. We began with establishing a safe space for ourselves by creating group rules and boundaries for us to follow for example stimming is allowed and you don’t have to keep your camera on if you do not want to. We caught up as a group because we had not been together properly since our last project in 2019 prior to lockdown. We play drama games together including on the News today and why are you late?
What was special about this session was that there were people who were moms on the call who felt able to participate and their children felt safe to act with us and added very valuable comedy to the session.
I created Alternative Voices Theatre Company in 2014 as a response to the lack of opportunity for neurodivergent artists to do theatre once they had finished education or university. We became an official Community interest Company in November 2025 after I successfully completed a government funded business course. I wanted the company to be a safe space for people like us to engage in the activity that they love, theatre.
I already discussed the Psychological Safety session in a previous blog so you can read about that there but what I can say is that despite the technical issues the company managed to have a very positive session and what struck me was how willing to support each other the group is, even the newer members that we have only just met. This is a credit to everyone in the group and their strength of character.
The third session was held on Tuesday the 19th of May and was facilitated by my dear friend Natalie bell. Natalie is a very talented leader and artist but because Society has not given her the opportunity to demonstrate her skills this was the first time she had facilitated a session since she was on a travelling cruise ship doing theatre arts in 2009. As expected, Natalie shone like the star that she is and she delivered a very informative session on vocal health. She taught us how much actually goes into learning to speak, producing speech and moving the mouth in order to produce speech. This made me think of our nonverbal friends and how much they have to learn in order to communicate, something which we take for granted every day. Natalie gave us hints and tips on how to look after our voice and she taught us vocal warmups that we can do before preparing to speak or act. I enjoyed the session so much that I found myself drinking a ginger and lemon tea, which was not too hot, before bed to soothe my throat. Something that I had never heard before.
The next session was session 4 which was on May 20th, 2026, the next day. This was a session about what it is like to be neurodivergent and working in the arts. This time there were five of us online, but I knew it would be less this week because some of our members are working with Open Theatre Company Coventry and Birmingham on their touring production of ‘Falling.’ This session was on at the same time as the final night of their run and so we wished them luck prior to the beginning of the session.
A section of the session was meant to be run by much Recardo but unfortunately, he is currently experiencing autistic burnout, and I advised him not to attend the session because he needs time to rest. Fortunately, the session still went ahead as we had the marvellous Nicky Priest step in for us pretty well last minute.
Nicky did an excellent job not only guiding the group through the changes in facilitator but also in keeping the pace and timing of the session together. I am still not used to telling my story as a neurodivergent person, so I tried this time to deliver it in an informal way using examples of how my autism is either a positive or negative thing in relation to my acting career. My section was exactly 36 minutes long which is not bad considering this is only the Fifth time I have told my story verbally to a group of people. Nicky was incredibly kind and supportive of me as a professional actor, and I was taken aback because I was not expecting such kindness and positivity from an audience.
When Natalie delivered her section, I reflected that previously we would not have been able to do this because we would have all been too affected by the change in facilitator and all the last-minute changes. This made me reflect on how far we have all come as people and as actors. Once again, the children felt able to join in the drama games at the end and what warmed my heart was seeing them laughing at the idea of all of us attending an audition in a chicken outfit. We were playing a game of fortunately and unfortunately hence why I used those words earlier on in the blog.
We were meant to be having a spoken word poetry session tomorrow on Friday 22nd of May 2026 but because Matt Recardo is unwell, we are postponing the session to another date. We will be back on Tuesday 26th of May 2026 with a session of comic book drawing which I am highly looking forward to. I will finish this blog by saying that I am the happiest I have ever been in my life I have a safe space to do what I love with my friends, and I finally feel that I am living the life that I want to live. I hope you are all doing well and that you have a peaceful and pleasant evening. We look forward to seeing you at the next session on Tuesday the 26th of May 2026.