How Doechii’s iconic Grammys performance came together

Doechii’s performance at the 2025 Grammys was an instant classic. Acrobatic and theatrical, it was a performance that nodded to her Florida roots and showcased a love of classic Broadway musicals, while introducing her as an artist to many for the first time. Initially dressed in a Thom Browne short suit before it was dramatically ripped off by her dancers, Doechii transitioned from opening song “Catfish” into “Denial Is A River” in a white two piece. Nailing her choreography and never missing a bar with her vocals, the highwire performance was loaded with risk but executed like a pro. As the song ended the camera panned to an awestruck Billie Eilish who, summing up the mood in the room, simply mouthed “Oh my God.”

Since then, the performance has already gone down in Grammys history as one of the best to grace its stage. The day after the ceremony, The FADER spoke to Doechii’s creative director C Prinz, choreographer Robbie Blue, and set design team See You Later to get the lowdown on how her iconic performance came together.

C PRINZ, CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Doe and I have a history. We did our first music video called “Crazy” together, and it was her launch with TDE. So she called me on Christmas Eve [2024] and was like, “We’re doing the Grammys and we need a concept now.” She really had a clear vision. She wanted to incorporate the swamp, obviously, [that’s] her whole brand. I threw together some mood boards, and we ended up having a couple of different concepts. One was an actual, real swamp. But we were both so captivated with this other idea, this Doechii doll factory, swamp-Broadway play. We wanted to throw things that were contradictory to each other together, and see what would happen. What does a swamp look like on Broadway?

Doechii came to me with the idea of having all the dancers look exactly the same as her. Same makeup, same hair, same shoes, same nails, same everything. One of the other dancers embodies her, and we gave her a prop mic and we wanted to do this whole “Where’s Waldo? Where’s Doechii” thing. The simple story is that there is only one real Doechii. It’s like there’s only one real Slim Shady: You wanna try to be like me, you can’t, but you also can see yourself in me at the same time. At the end, she ends the show alone in that spotlight.

We started this at the top of the new year, our rehearsal process. With everything that’s going on in this country, the fires, politics, we wanted to make the space feel warm and build a family because we knew we were going to make something that required a lot of dedication and energy and time. I don’t even remember exactly how many rehearsals it was, but we rehearsed this for 4 weeks [daily]. The dancers gave body, mind and soul for this one.

We definitely had an internal dress rehearsal to test [how everything would work with the Thom Browne clothes]. You know, it’s beautifully tailored garments. We had to add fabric here and there to give the dancers a bit more stretch because what they’re doing is incredibly demanding. Even Doechii, you know, wide-out in the splits, flipping, kicking, going into a backbend. The wardrobe change moment took an entire rehearsal. [The clothes] had to be pulled off in one second in one rip with no mistakes, so if that gets clunky, it’s like, oh, nightmare. The wardrobe team and the stylist, Sam Woolf, were workshopping different sizes of velcro, buttons, “do we need to rip from the front or the back?” What angle? What intensity can we rip at that doesn’t knock Doechii over? There was a lot of technical consideration. The first time we tried it with our choreographer, she fell over [laughs].

There’s a lift, there’s moving floors, wardrobe changes, an airboat, there’s her swamp culture, these clones, and this concept of there’s only one real Doechii — it’s such a complex show. It made me very emotional and proud to put something like that out in the world. I want to give a big shout out to my creative producer, Eli Raskin. He let me call him all day and all night.

SEE YOU LATER (DARRIUS MEDINA + TJ HOOVER), LIGHTING AND STAGE BUILD: We started work on the performance after meeting C Prinz at the beginning of January. We’re used to dealing with a lot of short timelines. It’s what we do. We were working right up until the last minute, too. We turned in the content a couple minutes before the deadline. We were able to breathe when we were told by the Grammys that we can’t do anything else. There is always something you can tweak, you know? We wanted to make it perfect.

One of the big challenges with something at the Grammys is that, unlike other performances and things that we do, we’re not in a rehearsal space and so we can’t see things on the screen and really get to fine tune what we’re working on. They don’t give you a lot of time at the Grammys. I think we had like 30-45 minutes on the stage to kind of do a quick run-through and that’s it. We also had something like a 10 minute changeover. So all of the equipment had to get on and off stage very quickly. It was a big team effort with us all figuring out how to make this the best show possible.

Luckily Doechii and her team had a vision when they approached us and our job was essentially to bring that to life. She had this idea for a factory of Doechii clones to really underline this idea that there can only be one Doechii. The first half of the performance is very industrial and we have the airboat fan which is obviously inspired by her being the swamp princess. We wanted to take pieces of her artistry and incorporate it into the content. Then, in the latter half, for “Denial Is A River,” it’s more of an homage to old Hollywood, and movies like Chicago. There is a comedic kind of lightheartedness to that song. A big part of this was playing with light and using the screen as an extension of the set. If you look closely you’ll notice the lights keep the beat of the song. We also had the lighting ring framed by the speakers and the sound corridor towards the end. Then on the stage we had to build in the hydraulic lift she arrives on and the conveyor belts for the dancers. Figuring out how to have all of these elements without cluttering things up was a big part of the creative process.

ROBBIE BLUE, CHOREOGRAPHER: I’ve actually been a huge fan [of Doechii] for a really long time. We kept up with each other through Instagram. When it comes to the choreography, I took hold of the dancers and the inner workings. When it came to her solo moments and, you know, when she’s up in the straddle lift, all of that stuff was collaborative. I had built this idea that she could be suspended in some way. I did not offer up the straddle idea; I didn’t want to freak her out literally on day one. She’s like, “What if I just got on top of them in a middle split?” I’m like, “That would be actually epic.” She just plopped right up there and we were like, “Well, OK.” That was the first time I was like, this girl is down to do everything and anything, like she really will go that far.

She had the vision even before we started learning choreo. She gets the camera, she knows where her shot is, she knows how to execute it well. She wanted that old Hollywood theatrical, Fosse situation. When she said that, I was like, this is right up my alley. I love anything Fosse adjacent. Our first reference point was the Frug, Sweet Charity, things that are so iconic and glamorous but also dark and abstract. Throughout the whole thing, we were fusing Fosse old Hollywood glamour with gritty nasty hip-hop. We never watched anything else. We really made [the style] from scratch.

I think you could say we gave an hour to every five seconds. Music wise, the way Doechii creates this jazz world in “Denial Is A River,” that was something that changed so many times. I have videos of like 20 different “Denial”s based on the music and the jazz riffs. But everything was worth it. Seeing Doechii perform like that after she had just won a Grammy, when she came backstage before they put her up on the lift, she was in tears. We all had a moment together where we were like, “You just won a Grammy, this is incredible, and we’re about to slay this.” Me, Prinz, and my assistant were backstage watching the monitor. The performance was always great in the rehearsal room, but it was never that good. That time on stage was like a beast. The dancers danced their ass off. Doechii literally lit it up. It became its own monster.

Additional reporting by David Renshaw.