First Black Woman in Space

Every space is a safe space if you are wearing a spacesuit

“It’s hard to stop rebels that time travel.” And so Simone Dede Ayivi and her accomplices dared to risk a return to the planet Earth in the year 2016 from Afrofutura.

There, they meet women of color who dream and fight and delight in building the future – like many generations before them. Black female role models were never rare – simply underrepresented. And they made it into outer space very early on:

Lieutenant Uhura on the USS Enterprise and, nearly 30 years later, Mae C. Jemison on the Space Shuttle Endeavour. Thus we have a fictional person and a real person whose achievements are closely connected to each other since, after all, we will always only receive the future that we trust ourselves to dream of.

Photo: © Ute Langkafel

Photos: © Ute Langkafel

FIRST BLACK WOMAN IN SPACE is a feminist, Afrofuturist project that is dedicated to African and Afrodiasporic stories as well as the current situation of Black women and women of color. We tell stories of struggles for emancipation and empowerment. Over the course of a multimedia science fiction performance, we assert a post-racist future and dare, with the help of sound and video recordings, to look back at the questions of our long-past present. The stage becomes a backdrop of outer space and theater a future laboratory of performers and audience – a space for utopias.

TEXT, PERFORMANCE Simone Dede Ayivi
SCENOGRAPHY För Künkel
SOUND Katharina Kellermann
VIDEO Kathrin Krottenthaler
LIGHTING DESIGN Rosa Wernecke
DRAMATURGY Jule Sievert
OUTSIDE EYE Julia Wissert
ASSISTANCE Caroline Froelich, Mirjam Pleines
SOUND RECORDING FOR VIDEOS Deniz Sungur
OBSERVERSHIP Sina Charalabidis
PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT ehrliche arbeit – freies Kulturbüro

A production by Simone Dede Ayivi and team in co-production with Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt and SOPHIENSÆLE. Funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe, the Lower Saxony Ministry for Science and Culture, Fonds Darstellende Künste e.V and the Stiftung Niedersachsen. 

The world premiere was on October 20, 2016 at Sophiensæle.