Diovanna Obafunmilayo’s Mind, Body, and Spirit
2025 CPR AiR Obafunmilayo discusses invoking the divine in her recent performance piece GODBODY
By Shamira Ibrahim
On any given night in New York, a body steps into a circle and the air shifts. In a church basement in Brooklyn, the Hammond organ swells and a woman in white catches the spirit. In a ballroom floor in East Williamsburg, a queen dips and the crowd roars, hands lifted like a congregation at altar call. To move is to testify; to spin, stomp, or snap is to summon lineage. From Yoruba Orisha ceremonies to Sunday service, from The Nation of Gods and Earths’ mathematics to vogue’s tens of approval, Black movement has always been ritual, both as an act of remembrance and an act of resistance.
Across the African diaspora, the body is not separate from the divine; it is the site where the divine takes shape. In Black traditions, to be “God Body” is an acknowledgment that the sacred lives in the flesh. Whether in the footwork of hip-hop or the ecstasy of gospel praise, Black movement is ceremony. It is capturing the energy of the room, manipulating space, and understanding where body, spirit, and community find common ground. It is how we crown ourselves when the world refuses to.
As a student of both performance and ritual, Diovanna Obafunmilayo is highly attuned to the process of imbuing her art with a potent vulnerability. With that same curiosity, she invites the audience to connect with her spirit through her performance of GODBODY, a ritual opera, guiding viewers through a reimagining of what rebirth looks like in its varied cultural iterations over two distinct ceremonies. In both performances, rebirth isn’t exclusively situated in the context of a crowning; while the ceremony is an anchor, Obafunmilayo finds its cultural echoes and lets them take shape in her image, from a curious child’s hand games to the call-and-response of the ballroom scene and everything in between.
“I don't want it to be this Katherine Dunham experience, where I'm just taking you into a Voodoo experience. I want to tell a different story in the framework of that,” she stresses. “How do you rebirth a body and endow it with power, and do so in a way that isn't riddled with shame? This is the making of a body, the mind – what does that look like?” More than a piece of performance theater, Diovanna invites us to understand her philosophy of life, and all the magic that lies therein.
When you got the [Center for Performance Research] residency, where were you in the ideating process of GODBODY as a multimedia experience? Was it a sketch? Was it a poem? Was it just a burning ember in your head?
It honestly came from me listening to a lot of Westside Gunn and a lot of Ghostface. Between the Outkast/Goodie Mob/Dungeon Family Southern hip-hop that my dad introduced me to, and New York hip-hop that my mother's side of the family immersed me in, I realized that I listened to a lot of it walking around the city, because it really does make me feel invincible. This residency was my first time I had the opportunity to put everything I could into one space and exploit its full capacity, fitting all that is inspiring me in this moment into the frame as much as possible.
That music is part of my armor – there’s a Ghostface song, where one of the first lines he very clearly says “Body bright in God-body.” There's a certain layer of divine protection that I wanted to put on your body. Taking this energy through ceremony, through music and dance, through art, layering it on top of that.
In a lot of your approach, the multimedia experience is rooted in spirituality. Even the concept of God Body, I immediately thought of Five Percenters and how they reference the body in spirit – Arm, Leg, Leg, Arm, Head. There seems to be a throughline in the way you express movement, and the spiritual elements that are prevalent in hip-hop. How did you find these connections?
That is the most exciting feedback. Because honestly, this is a part of the energy that I realized that I approach my work with. Let's say every ceremony has a purpose. If there was a purpose to this ceremony, it was to rebirth a body that did not exist with any shame. I as a person struggle with my own pockets of shame, insecurity.
The score goes crazy. I was blown away by how you looped Stevie Wonder’s “Overjoyed,” and played around with pitch and scratching so that every loop felt like it had a different meaning. You not only found the spirit in the song, but gave it a new life.
When it comes to live performance, the first thing that I can visualize best in the space is what it sounds like. I was originally going to work with a producer to actually have a DJ in the space who had an idea of what the sound design was going to be, and make it live in real time, but that person did not work as fast as I wanted. Since I also do songwriting, I know how to engineer a bit, and I started to collage certain sounds together. Once I nailed the first song in the score, I was like, I’m doing this.
All of the parts of this creative experience were really enjoyable, but the audio -- I don't think anything excites me more than when I start to get into a new medium, or when I'm using a medium I already have some familiarity with, in ways that are surprising me in real time. Even the song with the Stevie sample in it – that came from the composer Steve Reich, and how he approaches how something can be used and replicated. I take every instance in which Stevie sings overjoyed, over love over time, and just continuously loop that over and over to give myself a very specific world. Being in a space now where I can actually pin it down and create the world from that aspect is exciting.
I think about the story of hip-hop - there's a lot of things you can talk about, the political, the capital, et cetera – but at the core of it, it's kids in the 70s and 80s who were told that they were disposable, and decided to find joy for themselves. They’re declaring their own worthiness, their own godliness, and physically putting their body in conversation with spirit.
When you think about the best contemporary rappers right now -- some of them are ones who are known for expressing their complicated relationship with spirit. Kendrick Lamar is having a religious crisis on every album. Part of the whole appeal of Clipse, beyond them being brothers talking about cocaine, is how they both engage their relationship to sin – almost like Cain and Abel. There aren’t many spaces that talk about hip-hop as, yes, a space of reclamation, but also a space of divinity.
A lot of the ways I see Black artists working now is in collage work – making the very clear throughline of diasporic Black culture, all of the multitudes that we exist in and all of these facets of culture that we've created. They are essentially mirroring each other, with their own specific, codified ways of moving in certain spaces that are inherently informed by one another. So, within my view, it was, how does Cuban rumba or Santeria tambor reflect rap? How is the art of Haitian vèvè drawing reflected in the graffiti practice of hip-hop? They all engage with the same ideas: What is it to exist in a divine way?What does it mean to move in an embodied way? Talking about hip-hop as a site of inherent spirituality is very emotional.
There is a part in GODBODY where you bring out other dancers and embody the curiosity and mercurial spirit of children. I loved that your movement acknowledged the ways that children engage in ceremony, community, and fellowship in their own rituals through experiences like hand games. It was an inspired way to showcase those analog spiritual experiences. What inspired that type of play?
It was inspired by the idea of rebirth. In my head, this ceremony was always like a cross between crowning and ancestral veneration, but also a birthday – if this is a rebirth of someone, then this is a birthday party. So where are the children? The idea of it being three performers, including myself, is very important to me: it’s the number of the Marasa, it’s the Trinity, the number three is always connected. In an Afro-spiritual focus, there is always the divinity of the young and the divinity of the very old, and I wanted to explore how those energies play together and explore the grouping of three feminine bodies in space.
People come to me looking for information on Orisha, and everybody wants to be crowned. I often will remind people that if you think about what it means to represent and worship Orisha, at some point, someone had to just go sit at a river and be creative. That is inherently what religion is. It’s an art form that involves coming up with very specific, codified symbols that correlate to one another. That's how we get the theology and the dogma and the mythology of it all. But in and of its core, it really is an intense game of creativity, so I think of children, especially when talking about untapped imagination. I've been an artist pretty much since childhood, and can very vividly remember coming up with games and secret languages between my sister and me, learning to dance on the street as kids – it was very intentional to highlight that hidden wisdom.
I'm wondering how you thought through the movement for the piece – did you develop a specific movement vocabulary to help you evoke the various intense emotions throughout the different phases of the piece?
Much of the piece was just a conversation with myself and what my body wants to do in this moment. I have an emotional score I know at the top of the piece, and the more I get into a performance art practice, the more I'm dealing with devising and designing emotional scores that have very specific textures or directions that I want to explore, and I let that be the assignment. I really value an intelligent body moving in a space the way that it sees fit to in that moment, because you just can't predict what that energy is going to feel like before you're in that space. Though I respect choreographers who can really deal in the 5-6-7-8, I think the most special moments of dance I've ever been privy to are always moments in which this very intelligent body, whether it's through classical training or something more spiritual, is allowed to do exactly what it wants to, understanding the performance dynamics that are at play.
The lighting design throughout the program was very dynamic – there are moments of remarkably deep reds, really bright blues, and tightly focused spotlights. How were you thinking through the color scoring – what were you trying to channel in those peaks and valleys?
I really didn't think about the lighting until tech, because I can never quite anticipate what the full capacity of lighting can be. The moment I thought about most specifically was where I am blasphemously chopping up and screwing Balm In Gilead; I knew very specifically what I wanted. I told the lighting designer, I want it to look like I poured dirty Sprite all over the wall; give me neon, give me purples, give me red. That’s probably the most dynamic moment, because it correlates with the intense music. I viewed this whole scene taking place on a canvas, you know, so at any moment I could repaint any color that I wanted. I'm a painter, and approached this from a very painterly way – manipulating the space with shadows, light, and color to conjure emotion.
Within the visual space are all these different surfaces – a canvas that you draw on, a physical white shroud, a canvas on the back wall that ends up being used for different projections, from 80s and 90s club scenes to ballroom scenes. And then, of course, the actual floor itself becomes a canvas for movement, and also the things that you adorn, including the table at the back, that is somehow both a birthday party, an anointing, and The Last Supper all at once. What is your practice bringing all this media together to express something cohesive?
I don't know that I try to organize it so much as I try to make sure there's a certain rhythm. I think this is where my spiritual practice comes into play – it was less about me inventing a structure and more about allowing the purpose of each moment to decide the order in which it happened. When I'm thinking about ceremony, there's always an intentional way that someone enters the room, to what they're wearing, and to where they go in the room. If that's going to be where they go in the room, then what does that part of the room represent? The songs that we're singing, the energy states we invite in the room – if anything, it's a narrative that helps me dictate the score and the organization. As long as I have an understanding of why I'm doing certain things, I can play with what I include in these different scenes and pour in as much symbolism to these different moments as I want. There's freedom to layer in so much symbolism that I don’t necessarily worry about making it clear; it's just about doing it intentionally, so that the most learned person in the room understands all of my references, but at the bare minimum, you're going to be experiencing a sensory overload.
There’s a moment where you bring a friend into the performance and end up painting and adorning him. I'm wondering what intention you had at that moment, and what you were trying to evoke in such an intimate experience.
I originally had a completely different ceremony in mind. Up until the day of the performance, I was thinking that I was the body that I was doing the ceremony on, until I realized that I’m actually working up all of this spiritual energy and doing all of this conjuring to then bestow it upon someone else. Even the projections in that moment were very intentionally evoking the divine feminine – I found clips from this queer club in Chicago called Club Lorraine on Instagram. I’m using that energy to throw color and to rebirth this person wearing all white into the space, treating them as a canvas. I think the most special moment about that journey was thinking, Oh, I'm gonna take the audience on this journey of rebirthing myself, only to realize that I'm actually doing it to someone else, because I've already been on this journey.
I really love that connecting ethos of the birth of a body without shame.I think what you put together makes clear that there's divinity everywhere. You can find spirit in your inner child; you can find spirit in hip-hop; you can find spirit in ballroom.
I love that, because it's true; divinity exists everywhere, spirit exists everywhere. Making clear the lineage that I come from – spirit exists in the room because a lineage of artists existed to get it there. The practice that you have, in many ways, does just kind of come out of thin air, but that's because you're listening. That's because you're paying attention; and the coalescing of all of these different threads and inspiration come into the room in the exact moment that they're supposed to.
I don't know if I can name a Black artist who insists that they are working from this completely original place, right? Like sampling, chopping, screwing, remixing, and then re-collaging back together. I think, especially for Black artists, it’s important to exist in a way that does some sort of ancestral veneration, where you're acknowledging this is the lineage that that I come from, from the people that I'm paying reverence to, to the people whose work I'm intentionally subverting.
At what point did the art come to fruition in the cycle of working on this project? Did new pieces come to life as you were starting to put things together?
I would say it was throughout. There's three major paintings that are in the gallery show. Two of them I did prior to the show, and then the last one -- the huge ceiling to floor one -- that I actually did within a performance. But there’s also this very tiny sculpture that lived at the front of the gallery that I made when I was, like, seven years old. And so the gallery show, in and of itself, was a glimpse into what my artistic journey has been so far.
I've always sketched ideas, but usually they are legitimately sketches: small in size, and I don't necessarily put that much effort into them. This time, I was like, why don't I just be a really big canvas and actually make a painting out of the ideas that I'm sketching? I had so many ideas and so much that I wanted to get through, all around the concept of getting this energy out of my body to be able to look at it. If I put my body onto this canvas, what is the idea that I'm trying to imbue on and around it? I was also rediscovering and becoming really inspired by the artwork of Ana Mendieta – I knew I was going to trace my model and have that be a throughline. When making the paintings, that was one of the first things that I did – and similarly, later in the dance piece, you see me using a body as a canvas. Painting was a way for me to create and receive ideas and energies of the flow state in real time, and then be able to look back on it and understand how all of these different symbols come together.
How has it felt for you from show to show? Have you felt a difference between performances?
The first time I did it, I was way more explanatory. I was doing way more explaining of what the symbolism in the performance was going to mean, so that y'all would get it. The second time around, I was really intent on telling the story out of my mouth, and so the performance of it all was almost a backdrop to the story. I've become less vocal and reliant on that every single time. I think part of the pedagogy is to make the channeling of spirit and energy in the moment as effortless as possible.
Shamira Ibrahim is a Brooklyn-based cultural worker by way of Harlem, Canada, and East Africa, who explores identity, cultural production and technology as a critic, reporter, feature writer, and essayist.
Diovanna Obafunmilayo Frazier is a multimedia performance artist, Grammy-nominated songwriter, award-winning filmmaker, and poet.