My mediums: writing, musical composition, performing arts, vocal performance, synth

Moth Broth is an all queer psychedlic pop collaboration formed by musician and autoharp extroardinaire Greg Hatem in 2015, with the addition of Jason Charney in 2019. Our music explores the occult, the divine feminine, and the strangeness of the natural world, all wrapped in whimsical pop composition, conjuring stories of magical fauna, ghosts, and climate change through my voice, Greg's autoharp, and a sprinkling of synth arrangements. The 2022 release of our debut album, I, a Flying Crab, allowed us to truly take flight, performing with queer indie legends Xiu Xiu in 2023 at Metro Gallery and with giants of the local scene including Chiffon, Nourished by Time, Darsombra, Amy Reid, Manners Manners, and more, bringing our signature over-the-top psychedelic stylings to hundreds of new listeners. We are also a frequent feature on iconic indie radio station WFMU and appeared as their number one cassette release in the sumer of 2023. 

My own role in the band is as lyricist, lead singer at live performances, and backup synth player—with Greg doing the heavy lifting on the chordal compositions, the two of us collaborating on melodies and overarching song structures, and Greg bringing these compositions to life through opulent, psychedelic studio recordings which he mixes himself, to which I contribute my vocal stylings, synth diddies, and occasional editorial feedback. While our first EP —a labor of love six years in the making—is pending release, we have released a few singles and performed avidly around Baltimore at indie and DIY venues (including The Crown, Rituals, Current Space, Rhizome in DC, and Joe Squared), as well as over Zoom when necessary. In our live performance capacity, Jason Charney has joined us to provide a rich tapestry of live synth performance. In addition to spearheading and editing our socially distanced videos during quarantine (he and Greg were quarantined together at the time), Jason has also joined us in the composition of new music in the works!

In my own contributions to the project, I'm pulling from multiple disciplines: from my creative writing background to create lush fantasy worlds and new myths through my lyrics; from my music background to contribute in the composition process; and from my theater background to put together a feast of psychedelic costuming and embody the full drama of our songs through live performance. Moth Broth has never been one art form for me—it has been an opportunity to pull multiple mediums together and co-create something greater than the sum of its parts. Still, the through-line of performance pervades; to this work, I bring an attention to theatricality, visual aesthetics, movement, and ecstatic emotional embodiment in the performance of our work. 

Mediums: poetry, performance art, music, live performance, piano, voice

Dreambaby is my witch cabaret alter ego, as well as the quintessence of my interdisciplinary work as it combines poetry, storytelling, vocal performance, piano, and ritual for a unique and cathartic experience. Typical Dreambaby sets include original poems, a blend of original and covered music,and rituals that include audience participation. I also host and MC shows such as my 2019 Winter Solstice Tarot Ball and Arts Market at Rituals and numerous "Dreambaby Cabarets" like Nostos: a Dreambaby Cabaret at The Peale Center. Dreambaby operates firmly in the aesthetics of camp and the occult, drawing inspiration from artists like Diamanda Galas to bring spooky, operatic music and phantasmagoric writing/incantation to the ears of audiences everywhere. I've always described Dreambaby as more of a performance art project that uses music, ritual, and spoken word poetry as a storytelling medium—this is especially true in the sense that Dreambaby isn't a "music" project as heavily aestheticized covers of other artists' work comprise about 80% of the music I perform, making even the music itself more an act of theatrical mimesis than musical composition. Although I write the arrangements themselves, I am largely interspersing my own spoken word poetry and music with my own theatrical, witchy interpretations of music written by other artists; thus, the performance itself becomes the main artistic throughline of the work, collaging my own original work with mimesis. Dreambaby is meant to be experienced as live performance, and even studio recordings are complementary/secondary to that experience. 

Through my Dreambaby Cabaret experiences, I was one of Baltimore's early adopters of the "Zoom show" format, embracing the medium to create Diadem: a Dreambaby Cabaret as early as April 2020, Mayfair: a Dreambaby Cabaret in May of the same year, and Spells & Songs for the Winter Solstice in December—these shows brought in queer indie icons from across the country like Vinsantos (New Orleans), Jeremy Mikush (LA and San Francisco), and moon baby (Philadelphia) alongside of performances by current or former Baltimore residents like Ginger Witch, Talbolt Johnson, Amorous Ebony, Christine Ferrera, and Olga Comedy. Through Zoom, Dreambaby also co-hosted Apartscape 2020, guest featured for Mobtown Ballroom's Mobtown Live (my performance starts around 58 minutes), and featured music and poetry at the online Mushroom City Arts Festival. This year, thanks to warm weather and the scientific wonder of vaccination, Dreambaby was able to return to the stage for Cicadarama at Peabody Heights and join other shows like Laure Drogoul's popup 14 KT Cabaret shows at Maryland Art Place. 

As a witchy host, producer, musician, and performer born at the 2013 Transmodern Festival, Dreambaby has enchanted stages from Baltimore venues like Metro Gallery and The Crown to Washington DC (The Black Cat & Bier Baron Tavern), New Orleans (Siberia & The All Ways Lounge), and even Spain (La Xata La Rifa 2013). Dreambaby has also been featured at festivals like Electric Halloween (rural PA) and The Americana Burlesque and Sideshow Festival (Asheville). 

Although my work runs the gamut of composition, performance, music, and writing, my MFA is ultimately in creative writing and I would be remiss not to feature some of my more prominent publications. I am primarily published as a poet and a fiction writer with work that operates generally under the "speculative" umbrella focusing on encounters between the queer and the otherworldly (with an undercurrent of environmental justice pervading much of my work) through fantasy, dystopian sci-fi, fabulism (the more politically correct term for "magic realist" inspired writing that was not written in Latin America), and various forms of contemporary poetry. Aesthetically, I am interested in lush, maximalist imagery, voice-driven narratives, spellwork, incantation, the grotesque, and myth both new and reconstructed. Thematically, my writing explores queer relationships as they intersect with the pressures of capitalism and normativity, gender and body horror, environmental justice, and a heavy dose of witchcraft!

As mentioned, performance is still a major component even of my published work. Among PDFs of published work, this section also contains performances of prose and poetry. In context of my body of work as a performer, these performances of my prose and poetry shows a gentler, more "stripped down" performance approach than my often over-the-top theatrical or musical acting. When I perform my own work, I prefer for the focus to be on the words and images themselves, and my presentation of this work both visually and sonically underscores rather than interprets the written word. Of course, I am still "acting out" the words in my expression and tone, but I approach these recitations more as incantation than monologue. 

I keep a relatively updated list of publications on my website, including clippings of recent reviews and links to some of my online work. 
 

Mediums: theatrical performance (acting), writing, devising, directing

Since debuting with the Baltimore Annex Theater in 2012, I have been a regular staple of the Baltimore theater community as an actor in various indie productions. I was officially a resident actor for the Annex Theater from 2014-2017 where I was featured in two City Paper Best of Baltimore Awards (as Cucurucu in Marat/Sade in 2014 and Pup in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover in 2015) and starred in several acclaimed roles such as Alan Strang in Equus (2013) and Simon in our original devised adaptation of The Lord of the Flies (2016), which I co-wrote with Rjyan Kidwell, Sarah Jacqueline, Madison Coan, and Sarah Lamar. I also originated the lead role of Karl Glogauer in a new adaptation of Michael Moore's Behold the Man by Connor Kizer at the EMP Collective in 2015, starred as Timon in Shakespeare and Middleton's rarely performed Timon of Athens at The Mercury Theater in 2019, and originated the role of Miss Docent in Christine Ferrera's Cats, Criminals, and Comedians in 2019, which I also co-directed and co-devised and which we performed in Baltimore, DC, and New York with star-studded opening acts like Megan Stalter (at Vital Joint in NYC) and Olu Butterfly (at the Mercury Theater in Baltimore). 

Although my most major directing project (The Master and Margarita) can be found in a separate project, I do bring my skills in the mediums of writing, directing, and devising to several of these shows. Namely, I co-wrote and collaboratively devised Lord of the Flies, co-write and co-designed the episode of The Shades linked in my samples along with other episodes in that series, wrote the vocal melody for the Sharkboyd theme song although I am not properly credited for that contribution in the video linked here, and co-devised/co-directed Cats, Criminals, and Comedians in addition to performing in them. In Timon of Athens, I also assisted in costume design in that all the opulent clothes and jewelry worn by my character are my own, which I chose at the request of the head costume designer.

Both as Dreambaby and as myself, I have had the pleasure of curating, producing, and hosting a variety of events over the years. Here, I include a repository of those events. I made all the posters except for GEM, which was created by Kristen McWharter. 

I was the sole organizer for all events presented here except Proxima Arcanum (co-organized with dave ring) and Tooth Fair (co-organized with Devin Martin and Dessie Delaplaine), coordinating with all the performers myself and, in the case of Zoom shows, both running and hosting the show entirely on my own. 

I was most active in the performance art scene from 2013-2016, at the height of the Transmodern Festival and before the closure of many DIY and warehouse venues in 2017. Though video documentation of this period of my exploration has disappeared, I include here a few stills from various performance art pieces over the years.