About Your Dream Tenders, About AWAKE

Gogo Yemah ~ Jillian Walker, is a multidimensional artist (composer, playwright, performer, vocalist, dramaturg), diviner, healer, teacher, and Sangoma Priestess. She serves the larger mission to awaken the creative x ancestral spirit of humanity for the liberation of All.

From a heartspace that flows out of The Love of the Ancestors, Gogo incites and inspires sublime new forms of art, structures, and communal systems that break the brutal boundaries of the colonial imagination.

With her spiritual practice as the central portal, she has created and supported over a decade of art in the fields of theater and performance, music, film, television, as well as throughout the academy, in healing spaces, women’s circles, prisons, places of worship, and sacred spaces at and across the oceans.

Gogo Yemah comes from a lineage of teachers, healers and community builders and is rooted in her midwestern US upbringing, her red-dirt southern great-great and 3rd great grandparents, and the ancient ancestors of Southern Africa who called her to initiate and reclaim the medicines and Songs of her people.

She blesses the honor of her lineages through performance and practice. Her most acclaimed work, SKiNFoLK: An American Show (The Bushwick Starr/National Black Theatre: NY Times Critics Pick, Kilroys List, Lilly Award) is published by 53rd State Press. Her other plays and projects have received numerous honors and include Songs of Speculation (JACK, 2020 Third Coast Audio Unbound Award) and Sarah’s Salt.(Winner Columbia@Roundabout, Bay Area Playwrights Festival Finalist, Relentless Award honorable mention).

One of her favorite descriptions of her onstage work comes from Poet and Prophet Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who described her Joe’s Pub concert, Blue Ink, as “Transformational, Black feminist, ancestral-portal-opening, love-centered musical work.”

With her multifaceted training and education in traditional academic spaces (BA: The University of Michigan, MFA: Columbia University) and ancient afro-indigenous traditions (Chief teachers, Makhosi Himi Gogo Thule Ngane, Queen Baba Solstice Kha Ekhaya Esima, Makhosi Foundation), Jillian :: Gogo holds a unique combination of intellectual curiosity, spiritual rigor and an incredible capacity for deep listening and collaboration with people, built and natural worlds, time/space, Ancestors and all of the unseen.

Some of Gogo's favorite collaborations include: writing/performing and serving as Process Director with The TEAM (Reconstructing), creating Move, Meditate, Make with Libby King, working as a setlist dramaturg on Common’s Let Love tour, serving as dramaturg of divinity on the second season of Terence Nance’s Random Acts of Flyness (HBO), holding prompt-based performance classes with the students at The University of Washington and Harvard, holding circle with the women in Nisha Moodley’s Soul of Leadership, and sitting in prayer, song and healing space with her spiritual family at the Makhosi Foundation.

BLK GRK (or, hiding in plain sight), a multiversal, poetic exploration of the history of Black Greek Letter Organizations, is a deep upcoming collaboration with co-conceivers, Rachel Chavkin and Eric Berryman, and has expanded Jillian into its screenwriter, composer and star, alongside Eric Berryman.

Her onstage script(ure), The Whitney Album, opened at Soho Rep in New York City in May 2023.

She has since been in deep listening and devotion to the creation of the dream body of work, AWAKE that makes its home here in theoceanarchives.

Welcome and thank you for being here.

Inyosi ~ Nia O. Witherspoon, Full Spectrum Ceremonial Birthkeeper I am a creative spirit, grounded nomad, songstress, space-holder, and devoteé of Amadlozi (divine ancestors), Divine Feminine Energy, and Mother Earth.

I practice my medicine as a multidisciplinary artist-scholar, healing and birth justice practitioner, and cultural worker.  My primary mediums are writing, composition, directing, performing, and creating spaces for reckoning with and releasing individual and collective trauma.

I am a Deep Birthworker: a creativity and self-love doula, vision-tender, energy worker, ritual-performance artist, and student of the Divine Creator as they manifest in all forms to create more space for Love. I work with deep listening, plants, sound, water, breath, dreams, writing, and intuitive guidance to support myself and others in dropping into our most authentic selves, and connecting with our inherent worth, inherent divinity, inherent stardust.

This work has guided me through many formal trainings: in yoga, meditation + mantra; spiritual herbalism, birthwork, and committed me to initiatory study and practice in the Ubungoma path (Bantu-Zulu song, prayer, ritual, and shamanism). I have studied with a number of teachers across traditions for over a decade including Yoruba-based dreamwork, Afro-Cuban sacred song, and Mexican curanderismo.

About AWAKE

AWAKE is a Portal, a Process, and a Path that takes participants deep into relationship with their sleeping and waking dreams in order to open the creative and spiritual self. Its intention is to reindegnize the mind, rectify the body, and reclaim the spirit from oppression; giving us renewed fortitude to continue transforming the waking world. Comprised of Twelve ‘gates’ of creative prompts, practices and ancient wisdom on dreams, AWAKE is a journey for those who are called to rise in higher relationship to themselves, their lineages, and their imaginations as they dream to transform the waking world.

The Twelve Gates of AWAKE

Gate I | The Body (sample The Body Gate) (listen to a Body pod)

Gate II | The Spirit (sample The Spirit Gate)

Gate III | The Inner Child

Gate IV | The Water (sample The Water)

Gate V | The House (sample The House)

Gate VI | The Practice

Gate VII | The Shape

Gate VIII | The Soul & The Not-Self

Gate IX | The Cosmic Ancestors

Gate X | Past Lives and Karmic Relationships

Gate XI | The Tree

Gate XII | Technology + Communication