An astronaut returns to Earth from Afrofutura and looks back at 2016 as a place in history. That is the premise of Simone Dede Ayivi's First Black Woman in Space. Onstage, the Berlin theatre maker turned the present into a past that could be examined from a future in which Black women had already made space for themselves. The move changes the usual direction of a history lesson. Rather than asking whether today's institutions will eventually include them, the performance begins from the possibility that Black women are making tomorrow and asks what the world of 2016 failed to recognise.
Ayivi's work calls itself a feminist Afrofuturist project. It brings African and diasporic stories into a multimedia science fiction performance of text, sound, video and light. The premise is playful, but its argument is precise. A future cannot be imagined responsibly if the women who have already fought, dreamed and built are missing from the picture. Lieutenant Uhura from Star Trek and the astronaut Mae C. Jemison appear in the project's account as figures whose fictional and real achievements speak to one another across time.
The theatre becomes a laboratory for that exchange. Ayivi performs, while a team creates the scenography, sound, video, lighting and dramaturgy that let the room operate as a space voyage and a site of political memory. Her earlier Performing Back travelled through German colonial history using postcards, recorded voices and city locations. Between those projects, the past and the future are neither separate subjects nor a simple before-and-after. Each becomes a way to ask who gets to author the images through which a country sees itself.
A visitor from Afrofutura
First Black Woman in Space premiered at Berlin's Sophiensæle in October 2016. Its artist page describes Ayivi and her collaborators arriving from Afrofutura to meet women of colour on Earth who are already struggling, imagining and taking pleasure in building the future. A science fiction device gives ordinary political work an unfamiliar angle. From the vantage of another time, what might have looked like a marginal demand in 2016 can appear as a necessary part of history.
The project drew together a fictional space traveller and an actual one. Lieutenant Uhura was a Black woman on the bridge of the Enterprise in popular television long before Mae C. Jemison travelled on the Space Shuttle Endeavour. The two figures are not interchangeable. One belongs to a story written and performed for an audience, the other to the history of scientific training and flight. Ayivi brings them into relation because imagination shapes what a culture is prepared to recognise as possible. The invented future can alter the conditions under which a real achievement is seen.
Her stage persona does not need to claim that a Black woman's space journey began with either figure. The point is the line of visibility. Popular culture has often pictured a future in which Black people are absent or peripheral. Ayivi takes an already familiar spaceship image and makes it answer to histories of Black women's presence. The astronaut's return to the past allows the performance to turn the audience's room into an object of curiosity: what assumptions will a future visitor find here?
The production's sound and video were central to this effect. Ayivi's text and performance were supported by scenography from För Künkel, sound by Katharina Kellermann, video by Kathrin Krottenthaler, lighting by Rosa Wernecke and dramaturgy by Jule Sievert. The artist's work page also credits other assistants and advisers. A future made onstage is necessarily a collaboration of labour and technique. The lights that make space appear and the recorded voices that return the audience to the present are part of the argument.
A contemporary review in nachtkritik observed a globe unfolding from fabric on the floor, with Ayivi's face projected onto it. That stage image changes the scale of the performer. The globe is not a distant planet seen from a spacecraft window. It is made in the room, and a Black woman's face occupies its surface. The physical action of unfolding matters: a world appears through handling, not by simply switching to a ready-made background.
The reviewer also reported video images of eleven Afro-German women speaking politically. Their presence kept the speculative frame connected to contemporary people. Ayivi could travel from Afrofutura, but the women on screen already occupied the Germany she was visiting. The future could not be assigned only to the astronaut's costume or the theatre's effects. It was audible and visible in those women identifying their demands and communities in the present.
The production used science fiction to change the audience's position, then brought the audience back to the people whose lives would test any promised future. This movement prevents the spaceship from becoming an exit from politics. It is a device for seeing politics anew. Ayivi's stage makes a utopia provisional, a place to practise looking at what a supposedly ordinary present has pushed aside.
The show's own description says its performers assert a post-racist future, then look backward with sound and video at questions from the “long-past present.” That phrase gives the audience a double role. They are the present people being addressed, but also the historical subjects whom the visitors from Afrofutura study. The distance created by that shift can make familiar debates feel less inevitable. An argument about whether Black women should be visible in public life looks different when staged as a relic of an earlier age. Ayivi does not need to pretend that racism has already ended outside the theatre. The stage holds a temporary future in which people can measure the work still required to get there.
The city as an archive
Performing Back, first developed before the space piece, begins from streets, monuments and sites in Germany. Ayivi travelled between Berlin, Lomé and Hanover, investigating traces of German colonial history and asking how Black people might remember ancestors subjected to colonial violence. The project's route moves through public space rather than accepting a museum's selection as the whole archive.
Her artist page describes the performance as an artistic response to the continuity of that history. It includes recorded conversations with Black German activists and cultural workers, found objects and postcards sent between places called home and homeland. A postcard is a small object of travel: it announces a location, chooses a picture and sends a few words toward someone elsewhere. In Ayivi's hands, it can expose the instability of the categories printed by tourism and nationalism. Who is writing from home? Who is asked to treat another place as an origin?
The route through the city matters because colonial history can remain present in a street name while disappearing from the account a passer-by is given of it. Memorials can commemorate one set of figures and leave other lives unmarked. Ayivi's performance brings those everyday fixtures into the theatre where their meanings can be rearranged. The city supplies physical evidence; the stage provides a place to ask how that evidence has been framed.
Ayivi's first-person interview with LICHTHOF Theater explained her interest in concrete traces of the 1884 Berlin Conference and in the work of Afro-German activists who had already studied colonial memorials and street names. That inheritance is important. The performance was not a solitary discovery of an unexamined past. It drew on organised memory work and brought some of its questions into a different artistic form.
The Sophiensæle production page credits Ayivi with concept and performance, Juliane Kremberg with video and Philipp Khabo Koepsell with dramaturgy. Sound and music were also part of the production. The team shaped a travelogue whose images could move between urban place, recorded testimony and a performer speaking before an audience. Ayivi's investigation became theatrical through these changes of medium. A monument seen on a street and a monument shown on a stage do not command the same kind of attention.
The title Performing Back suggests a reply. Ayivi was not merely reenacting a colonial record. She was answering the ways it had been performed by institutions, cities and official stories. Looking backward from a Black perspective meant refusing the idea that the past was settled simply because a plaque, textbook or street sign had given it a name. The performance's future lay in that reply: a different public memory could be made if the people affected were allowed to frame the account.
Making the tools visible
Ayivi's artist biography says she often builds performances from interviews and biographical research and exposes the theatre's methods to the audience. Recordings, political speeches and conversations are not hidden behind a fictional scene as though they arrived without authors. The audience can see elements of construction. That approach complicates the authority of the person onstage, because a single performance carries many voices and because the techniques used to arrange them remain open to scrutiny.
The choice is particularly significant when a theatre makes claims about Black history. If a recording plays, who made it and where does it sit in a story? If a photograph appears, which relation does the stage create between the image and the people it depicts? Ayivi's projects make such questions part of their form. A future laboratory and a colonial travelogue both depend on media, yet the media do not serve as anonymous proof. Their placement is itself an artistic act.
In a 2017 interview, Ayivi described wanting to make art for a Black audience and to take herself seriously as a spectator. That decision changes the implied listener of her work. A Black person's response is not treated as a secondary reaction to a show designed first to educate a white public. The stage can begin from the knowledge, desires and humour of people whose experiences are usually introduced as subjects for others to learn about.
This position gives the Afrofuturist frame more than a new setting. First Black Woman in Space does not ask a future Black woman to explain why she belongs on a spaceship to an imagined default viewer. It lets her arrive, look around and find allies already working on Earth. Performing Back likewise does not begin by proving that colonial history matters. It begins among people and places through which that history is already present. The theatrical question becomes how to move, remember and make an image from that position.
Ayivi's work also makes room for an audience to feel the instability of its own view. A projector can turn a face into a globe. A recorded voice can bring someone absent into the room. A postcard can change the apparent direction of a journey. None of these devices is invisible. Their plain theatricality asks the audience to notice how every image of a nation or a future has been made, and therefore how it might be made differently.
The distance between a starship and a street
The two works' settings seem far apart. One reaches Afrofutura and places a globe onstage; the other follows colonial traces through actual cities. Their methods meet in a refusal of linear time. The past remains in present-day signs and family histories. A future visitor can turn 2016 into an archive. What people call the present is revealed as a contested arrangement of memory and possibility rather than a neutral point between two dates.
That arrangement has consequences for theatre itself. A stage can reproduce a familiar account of history even when it adds a new character to it. Ayivi instead changes who speaks, what evidence is carried and where the audience stands in relation to the picture. The woman from Afrofutura is both a science fiction figure and a critic of contemporary visibility. The traveller in Performing Back is both a performer and a person addressing inherited violence in public space.
Ayivi has made other works on solidarity and community, and her practice extends into essays and political organising. The theatrical pieces remain distinct, with different teams and different formal problems. Their shared energy comes from treating representation as something to be made in company with others. A future may need invention; it also needs people who will remember accurately enough to change what comes next.
In First Black Woman in Space, the visitor from Afrofutura could see women already building that change. In Performing Back, the city's traces could be gathered and returned to the people walking through it. Both works use the theatre's ordinary materials, fabric, sound, video, a speaking body, to alter the scale of a historical question. Ayivi's spaceships are made on a stage, but their journey begins in a country whose past has not finished speaking. The future looks back so that the people in the room can look again.