Painter, writer and musical theatre maker Brook Tate hit headlines recently with his ingenious Multicolour Maths book. He speaks to Rosanna Spence about his alter-ego Debra the Zebra, the inspiring dream that split apart the very fabric of reality – and how his life (and now many others’, too) will never be the same again
Eagle-eyed readers may already recognise Brook Tate from one of the many news outlets that picked up his Multicolour Maths book, which has radically altered the way some brains can understand maths forever. It’s really quite something to behold – especially for someone like me whose frustration with numbers drove me to tears many times as a child. But we’ll get to his incredible maths method in a moment, because besides crunching numbers (and transforming them into colourful mandalas) Brook is a multi-talented artist who’s been blending the worlds of painting, writing, and musical theatre in his unique style.
His creative world is a mind-bending menagerie of animal characters, technicolour mathematical mandalas with an honest vulnerability running throughout that has followed him on a near-10-year self-healing journey, starting from being ex-communicated from the Jehovah’s Witness community in 2016, taking him up to present day.
A self-taught painter and guitarist, his creative journey began in 2011, selling portraits of his friends before venturing into the theatrical world and discovering his parallel universe alter-ego Debra the Zebra (she began life as a simple character created for Brook’s nieces, but has grown to become so much more… “it’s not just a costume, nor is it drag. Debra is a real person to me; she has her own life and brings a lot of power and positive influence into my own”). His stage works, Mr. Maglump (counting among its audience Andrew Lloyd Webber himself, no less) and My Great Giraffe, both inspired by stories he wrote for his nieces, premiered at the Bristol Old Vic in 2019, with the latter transforming into a picture-book-musical during the pandemic. His 2021 hit Birthmarked was a standout at the Bristol Old Vic and made waves at Edinburgh Fringe 2023, where it was even hailed as one of the ‘Best Shows At Fringe’ by The Stage.
There’s a lot going on in Brook’s realm. And despite the fact he’s been busy in talks for more projects that may well see Debra the Zebra’s plane of existence developed into a whole new world of representation for all ages – which he teases includes working with a world-class production house linked some of the most popular and time-honoured shows on the telly – we manage to grab hold of one luminescent idea tumbling from Brook’s brain and explore it in depth in a conversation held via Zoom between Bristol and India. But as it turns out, much like the interconnectedness of all things, Brook’s Multicolour Maths project is inextricably linked to his other creative endeavours – notably the aforementioned Queer zebra.
Brook in Bristol
“In 2016, I was excommunicated from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and after that, I ended up moving to Bristol,” Brook explains.
He’d been planning to study paediatric nursing at the University of the West of England, yet wasn’t able to join the course due to failing the maths entry test (an important point in this story). But the two days spent in Bristol for the interview process were enough for Brook to feel spellbound by our city. “I just knew I needed to be in Bristol,” he recalls. “So, I packed up my things into boxes – my oil paints, my guitar, and of course, my clothes – and moved here.”
Within the first week, Brook found the much-loved Leftbank Open Mic night and began sharing music he’s written. But the lyrics, which on the surface sounded like romantic break-up songs, actually held a deeper meaning.
“It felt secretive,” he says, “because the lyrics of many of my songs were about being ex-communicated, losing family and losing my faith in God. I was expressing everything I was feeling, but no one really knew exactly what I was singing about. It wasn’t until years later that I decided to share what those songs were really about, and that’s how Birthmarked the musical came to be.”
Birthmarked (directed by Olivier-winner Sally Cookson) told the story of a young gay Jehovah’s Witness coming to terms with his sexuality and finding his feet (and high heels…) in a world he once believed would be destroyed at Armageddon. The show also saw Debra the Zebra brought to life.
“As I performed her, I began to subconsciously imagine her existence in a parallel universe… how she became Brook. In the story, she gains flamingo wings and an elephant tusk on her head, turning into this kind of drag, Frankenstein-esque unicorn. But she doesn’t even realise that’s what’s happening to her. She jumps off a mountain, flies so fast that she splits the fabric of the universe, and explodes into a rainbow of colours as she enters our universe… smashing right into me in the belly of Gayle the Whale.”
Despite the psychedelic, playful nature of his storytelling, it’s underpinned by deep existential discovery for Brook. Birthmarked drew an immensely positive reception, but there’s no escaping the intense effects that come with this kind of revealing, personal storytelling.
“Performing in theatre was taking so much out of me because it’s such a vulnerable process. It made me realise just how much I’d given, how much it had helped me grow, but also how burnt out I was. I started to feel like I wanted to do more with my art, something different.”
All change, please
It was after Birthmarked’s stand-out success at Edinburgh Fringe that Brook found himself at a creative crossroads. Between pondering Debra’s journey alongside his own, and choosing a new direction for his art, he couldn’t ignore an intrusive thought bringing him to the very start of his Bristol experience, and it felt like it might offer a solution: “It hit me: it was maths. I needed to understand maths. Why was I even thinking about maths? I was so bad at it, but I became obsessed with the idea.”
So, Brook bought himself a maths textbook, grabbed three random dice he found in a drawer, threw a keychain abacus and his painting set into a bag, then headed to India. “India had been significant for me when I was a Jehovah’s Witness doing missionary work; it helped me see the world differently and led to many realisations. So, I went back there, but just a few days after I arrived, I jumped into a lake, cut my foot open and a seashell got stuck in it. I was on Munroe Island and couldn’t walk.”
Brook dragged a chair under a tree and tried to work through his maths book, frustrating as it was, then after nearly giving up, on New Year’s Eve 2023, the colourful temples and buildings surrounding him took on a new light. “I wondered, ‘how many colours do we have?’ At that moment, I counted them: white, black, brown, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. Ten colours. And I thought, I don’t think I’m missing any important ones, and I don’t think I’m forcing anything onto this list. I looked at the 10 colours and then thought, ‘We also have 10 numbers… What if we could do maths using colours instead? So,
I painted the colours onto my sketchbook and started experimenting.
I tried using traditional maths symbols – addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division – but it didn’t quite flow. It just didn’t work. I kept trying for a few days, but something still wasn’t right.”
A dream come true
The answer, it turns out, lay in a dream a few nights later. Brook had been nervous to talk about this at first, because he thought people would think he was just being “wild or crazy, or maybe too extravagant”.
“But since I started sharing it, I’ve learned so much – about problem-solving, about dreams, and about two states of consciousness called hypnopompic and hypnagogic, which happen when you’re waking up or falling asleep. I think that’s exactly what happened to me: my dream, my subconscious, the coincidences, everything lined up perfectly. I was in the right place at the right time, with the right foot injury, to have this moment of reinvention.”
In this dream, he walked into the Island Gallery in Bristol, and all around the walls were abstract paintings filled with circles, triangles, and other shapes. “They were beautiful, but very abstract, and I immediately knew they were my paintings. But I didn’t recognise them. In real life, my paintings are usually very realistic, so seeing this kind of abstract work was strange. I walked up to one of the paintings, and as I did, I melted into it. Suddenly, I was floating above the gallery, like I was in an astral plane or something. I could see the roof of the gallery, and then the entire city.
“As I floated higher, these patterns just started flowing out of me, like they were dribbling from beneath me, and I saw them stretching out, folding and unfurling. I floated above England, and then above the whole planet, watching these endless streams of colour pour out below me. It was like I was flying in space, watching everything unfold.
“I woke up from the dream and realised: that’s it – this is maths. I knew then that I had to try to capture it. So, early that morning, I sat down and painted my first calculation. And within just under two weeks, the whole method solidified itself.”
So, how does Brook’s Multicolour Maths method actually work? It uses 10 distinct colours to represent the 10 numerals we use, from zero to nine, and three unique shapes: a circle, a teardrop and a triangle.
The circle is just a number, neutral and doing nothing; it’s simply a number. The teardrop represents addition and subtraction, depending on how they’re read, while the triangle represents multiplication and division, again, depending on its orientation. Brook is also keen to further develop the method for people who have colour vision deficiency.
“With these three shapes and 10 colours, a whole world of patterns starts to unfold. It’s endless, and there’s no equal sign, so there’s no hidden pressure or sense of competition – no subliminal message telling you to ‘show me how clever you are’. Instead, it’s all about creating beautiful patterns and doing maths along the way.”
Brook tested his theory working with kids in the village he was staying in, who spoke Malayalam – of which Brook spoke little to none.
“We didn’t share a language, but they still asked me what was in my sketchbook. I told them, ‘I think it’s maths. Now, I’m not a maths teacher, and I was still nervous about maths myself, not really knowing what I had created. But within just 15 minutes, they understood it.
“We spent nearly two hours doing maths, painting with maths. And when I left, I was just blown away. I thought, ‘This is incredible’. After that, it felt like the universe kept nudging me forward, saying, ‘Get this out there. Do it. Now’. And so, here I am. It all started from a dream, and now I’m really invested in it.”
A class act
The response to Multicolour Maths has been “life changing”, with Brook receiving feedback from teachers the world over who are downloading the course. One Bristol-based teaching assistant emailed to say she’d been working with two students struggling with maths, who after trying the method were painting the two times table until they ran out of paper. The boy was so enthused, he even taught another class how the method works. Multicolour Maths will also land in the hands of primary school children across the country this month as part of a useful toolkit distributed by charity National Numeracy as part of National Numeracy Day activity.
For now, Multicolour Maths is an online course and a self-published book on Amazon, despite offers from publishers, because Brook wants to wait until he has solid research data to show just how powerful the approach really is (he’s currently on the look-out for a research partner, should any readers be interested in supporting its development).
Brook has also been experimenting with applying Multicolour Maths to the periodic table, with the goal of creating a “garden of elements, a whole new concept where each element is represented as a flower, a beautiful, colourful flower”.
While this new world blooms around Brook, his hopes for the project remain the same: “I really hope it helps people like me – adults who just couldn’t grasp maths. The book looks like it’s for kids, and it is, but it’s also meant to help adults understand the foundations of mathematics in a way I never could. I didn’t see the beauty in maths before, and that’s why it felt like a closed door for me when it came to further study.
What’s been incredible and motivating throughout this process is zooming out and realising that the majority of people in high-level roles in society – whether in finance, design, healthcare, science and technology – are people who’ve grasped linear, black-and-white maths. Many of us, especially in creative fields, feel like we’re not ‘intelligent’ in that way. But what I’ve realised through this experience is that it wasn’t me, it was the way maths was presented to me. It was the written form that was the barrier.
“Now I wonder: what could society look like if artists, writers, and creative people could grasp maths the same way they understand their art? What if they could see maths in its beautiful form? Multicolour Maths has been a complete breath of fresh air artistically for me – it feels like an entirely new chapter. It doesn’t have roots in my trauma [like previous work and performances]; it’s all about healing. And seeing it heal others has been incredibly meaningful.”
multicolourmaths.com | Brook’s two books Multicolour Maths Calculate in Colour and Multicolour Maths on Munroe Island are available to purchase from Amazon. All photos taken by Arto Marttinen (artomarttinen.com).
