Actors
- Performers
- Rebecca Langley · Alice Knuth · Shasyaa Harsh · Victoria Wanjiku · Pernille Nordtorp · Doreen Madonsela · Ellen Gram
Production dossier · New Nordic Voices
For Colored Girls
New York heat. Nordic stage. Ritual sisterhood.
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf arrived in Helsinki on International Women’s Day 2019 with the pulse of 1970s Black feminist theatre still alive inside it — not as museum text, but as living speech, movement, grief, humor, and release.
Historic alignment
On March 8, 2019 — exactly 44 years after its Broadway world premiere — Michael Omoke led and produced the first Nordic production of Ntozake Shange’s Tony-nominated For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, which premiered in Helsinki on International Women’s Day.
Presented under New Nordic Voices, the production brought Shange’s landmark choreopoem into a Nordic frame without draining it of its urgency, ritual force, urban lyricism, or Black feminist power. It was not treated as a relic. It was treated as a live current.
Staged in collaboration with Intercult and presented at Kulttuurikeskus Caisa in Helsinki, the work marked a decisive ACT moment: placing a defining text of African-American theatre into dialogue with Nordic space, audience, and cultural memory.
ChoreopoemDowntown pulseBlack feminist theatreSisterhoodRitualMovementReleaseChoreopoemDowntown pulseBlack feminist theatreSisterhoodRitualMovementRelease
Sequence I
Circle, chorus, and collective breath
The page opens where the production opens most powerfully: ensemble before individual, ritual before confession, bodies already in relation.
Sequence II
Heat against darkness
Red brick light, deep black space, saturated dresses, and isolated bodies create the emotional grammar of the evening: urban, intimate, exposed, and fiercely stylized.
Sequence III
Portraits, testimony, and the singular voice
Shange’s architecture is collective, but each woman must still arrive as a full force. The page slows to faces, attitudes, listening, and declaration.
Sequence IV
Care as stage language
This production understood that the force of the piece is not only anguish, rupture, and memory. It is also touch, gathering, witness, shared attention, and women holding one another through speech.
That is why this page keeps returning to clusters, embraces, lean-ins, circles, and counterweights. The work is not merely narrated pain. It is performed survival, staged intimacy, and collective bearing.
Afterglow
Movement, color field, and release
Cast and production team
Extracted and reorganized from the original Helsinki program materials.
Production
- Director
- Dr. Shirley Basfield Dunlap
- Producer
- Michael Omoke
- Stage Manager
- Anna-Marie Bilicher
- Light Designer
- Cheryl Williams
- Choreographer
- Elisha Ngoma
- Finance
- Anders Juhl
- Production Coordinator
- Zach Khadudu
Presentation
- Project frame
- New Nordic Voices / ACT
- Partner
- Intercult
- Venue
- Kulttuurikeskus Caisa, Helsinki
- Dates
- 7–9 March 2019
- Supported by
- Nordic Council of Ministers
A New Nordic Voices production carrying Ntozake Shange’s text into a Nordic setting while retaining its urban lyricism, ceremony, vulnerability, and force.