Tabori Award 2022 - Jury Decision: Simone Dede Ayivi

Simone Dede Ayivi is a director, performer and activist, all three of which she combines in her artistic works. With biographically motivated themes, she brings political struggles and movements, black history and the present day, transgenerational and feminist issues into focus in her projects. Through the political and re-contextualized narratives of her stage works, she has contributed substantially to a change of perspective in the independent performing arts.

Simone Dede Ayivi is mostly on stage herself, but there are many people who have their say in her productions. "Homecooking" (2021) presents an evening of cooking together, an impressively light format in which a space is created to share painful issues of experiences of racism with one another. "The Kids are Allright" (2020) combines impressions, both regional and time-based; children from families with a background in migration who grew up in Germany together look at the lives of their parents. Already here it quickly becomes clear that the center of Simone Dede Ayivi’s productions is always about one thing: solidarity. In various aesthetic settings, she succeeds in building bridges between people of different origins, different ages, different genders, and always opens a dialogue between them and their community. Research from multiple perspectives oscillates between individual experiences and normative patterns that need to be broken through. In her productions, this always holds the possibility of seeing oneself and a counterpart anew and perceiving them differently.

Since her first production in 2012, she has built a very broad network of artists and collaborators around her, who support and expand her ideas and whose voices are always integrated. Collective thought is an important factor in her way of working and includes more than just the pooling of ideas and conceptualizing. Love for theater and respect for the expertise of all those who bring a performance to life is also illustrated by her new production "Wetterleuchten", in which stagehands make the theater machinery at Theater Oberhausen dance without a performer on stage.

The Fonds Darstellende Künste’s jury of experts is awarding the Tabori Award 2022, endowed with 15,000 euros, to Simone Dede Ayivi, who brings societal issues to the stage, finds unique formats to negotiate these issues and thus sustainably changes the contemporary theater landscape and its production methods. Somewhere in between remembering and rediscovery, she impressively brings political struggles, emancipatory movements, black history and the present day to the stage in a way that is unique in the independent performing arts scene.