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 and a blend of original and covered music, often stepping into the realm of performance art through 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). 

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.

Mediums: creative writing (stage adaptation/theater), theatrical direction, dramaturgy

In 2016, I had the opportunity to realize a longtime dream of staging an original adaptation of my favorite work of literature, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. The iconic carnivalesque novel traces the devil's visit to Moscow, where he and his retinue wreak havoc on an anti-spiritual, highly censored, rigid Moscow while restoring the lives of Margarita and her beloved, the fallen-from-grace Master who has been banished from polite society for writing a novel about Pontius Pilate. 

I wrote the adaptation for the stage, a script project I had started at Johns Hopkins in 2012 under the mentorship of Joseph Martin, and directed the play through the Annex Theater, where I also did a bulk of the marketing. The show sold out 12 of its 16 shows and appeared among Baltimore City Paper's Top Ten Stage Productions of 2016. 

My production preserved the over-the-top, carnivalesque spirit of the novel while udpating its themes and playing with contemporary casting choices to the fullest extent allowed. Spoiled for casting choices due to the popularity of Bulgakov's work, the casting criteria (along with my co-casting-director Theresa Columbus) were as follows: I needed ten powerhouse actors to play an ensemble of over 100 characters, so I needed those actors first and foremost to be incredible talents while also affording the latitude to challenge the heteronormative, whitewashed, male-dominated status quo of the original work in which the primary roles for women are as vixens, mistresses, and witches. 

I ended up with a cast containing only one white/cis/straight/male-identifying actor, who consequently played The Devil himself (Woland), although even this choice was not a villification of straight, white men as Woland is not a villain in this story. Other noteworthy casting choices included casting The Master and Bezdomny, two central male characters, as Lucia Treasure and Caitlin Weaver respectively, affording the "troubled writer hero" storyline to two women. This meant that Autumn Breaud, cast as Margarita, made the central romantic relationship a queer one, played by two women who identify as queer in real life (too often, straight actors are heralded as "brave" for playing queer roles when queer actors themselves are passed over) and also speaks to my refusal to re-write a mature romance as two 20-something-year-old ingenues (a choice all too common even in "radical" experimental theater). In the concurrent Pilate/Jesus storyline, Pontius Pilate is double-played by The Master (Lucia Treasure), and Jesus is played by Margarita (Autumn Breaud), a choice The Bad Oracle reviewer referred to as "inspired" and one that highlights the metatheatrical nature of staging snippets of The Master's book. The choice to cast Margarita as Jesus also places the central woman in the messiah/martyr role, an archetype which I believe is consistent with Margarita's character in the original text, although I believe Bulgakov himself—based on his personal affinity with The Master, the autobiographical nature of that character, and his own martyr complex—would have reserved for himself. 

One reviewer from The Bad Oracle described the work as “a gorgeous, glamorous piece of small theater art, designed at its absolute best.” In nominating it as 4th place in Baltimore City Paper's Top Ten Staged Productions of 2016, Bret McCabe writes, "Annex company member Jacob Budenz flirted with biting off more than he could chew by adapting and directing Mikhail Bulgakov's carnavalesque Soviet satire, in which the Devil and his entourage come to Moscow. That Budenz and Annex pulled it off—with a nearly three-hour running time to boot—is due to its budget visual extravagance and the performers in two pivotal roles. Autumn Breaud brought a serene vulnerability to the star-crossed Margarita, while Martin Kasey nearly walked away with the production as Woland, playing this devilish figure like a Paul Lynde exterminating angel, the kind of judge, jury, and executioner who makes a wittily fey comment right before burning everything to the ground."

Everyone in the cast played 10+ characters, but below they are designated in alphabetical order alongside their primary roles: 
Autum Breaud: Margarita/Jesus
Emily Classen: Azazello
Theresa Columbus: Behemoth
Samy Figaredo: Koroviev
Terrance Fleming: Levi
Jonathan Jacobs: Berlioz
Sarah Jacqueline: Hella
Martin Kasey: Woland
Lucia Treasure: The Master/Pontius Pilate
Caitlin Weaver: Bezdomny

As a director, I also assembled a team of painters, musician, and costumers who helped me fully realize the opulent, operatic, over-the-top aesthetic of the play:
Set design: Zac Lawhon, Douglas Johnson, Frederick Gerriets
Costume design: Nicolette Le Faye
Lighting: Frederick Gerriets
Projection: David Crandall
Stage Manager: Ashley Saville

NOTE: Due to a high volume of actor nudity in this show, it was difficult to find appropriate video documentation to post here, but I've done my best to include work samples that show the breadth and scope of the production. 

In 2019, I was hired by MICA to collaborate with Kanta Kochhar-Lingdren to compose music for her spring production and co-teach her studio class as the production's music director. The production, At the Water's Edge, was an interdisciplinary experimental work combining dance, theater, electronic composition, live singing, and projection art to retell the story of Shakespeare's Tempest from a post-colonial, climate justice perspective. In it, Cycarax and Calliban become the heroic voices of indigenous and marginalized communities, calling up Prospero to answer for his colonialist violence. This narrative, which was written by Dr. Kochhar-Lingdren, her students, and MICA writing faculty, is woven together with troubling climate justice statistics supplemented with dance performance and my own composition.

In terms of my own work in this production, I not only composed the score from the ground up, taught it to students, and co-taught studio devising lessons that combined Dr. Kochhar-Lingdren's movement training with experimental vocalization, but also created a unique score combining field recordings of focal images of the play like bees/the sounds of ice (recorded and contributed generously by Richard Devine), with environmental sounds, foley art, electronic instrumentation, abstract/experimental vocalization, and traditional melodic throughlines and structures. The result is a combination of surreal and abstract sounds coalescing into more "traditional" music at crucial inflection points of the play, although the melodic arrangements never lose the hint of environmental soundscape, and the abstract soundscapes are interwoven with moments of melody. I was also tasked ad hoc as a lyricist; although I didn't write much text from the ground up (except the "Glacial Dirge Reprise," a riff on Shakespeare's "Full Fathom Five" monologue from the original source material), I was tasked with taking poetry and prose and editing it to fit into representational melodic song structures. 

At the Water's Edge was a game-changing and empowering artistic experience for me: I was paid a professional rate to compose music from the ground up, write that music for the voices of specific people standing before me, teach that music to students while helping them build new performance competencies through my music direction, and hone my own skills in digital composition that would go on to supplement my live performances, freeing my performance persona Dreambaby up for the first time to move about the stage and sing rather than remain static at the keyboard. 

Although much detail is lost in the live video recording, this set of samples contains a sample of live video to sample moments of my compositions in action, as performed by the ensemble or played underneath their performances. It also contains a selection of audio and sheet music. 

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. 

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. 

My own role in the band is as lyricist, lead singer at live performances, and backup synth player, and for our current body of work, Greg and I have collaborated on composition—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:  performing arts (theatrical performance, direction, set design), literary arts (poetry, drama, fiction), music (vocal performance, piano performance, electronic composition), performance art (ritual)

In January 2020, with the help of a Baker Innovative Projects Grant, I had the opportunity to revamp my original 70-minute cabaret experience, SIMAETHA: a Dreambaby Cabaret at the historic Carroll Mansion. Originally, I performed a draft of the work in 2017 at the Annex Theater.

The through-line of the work is primarily one long monologue about a queer, immortal witch performed by me, occasionally broken up by my musical performances, my rituals (sometimes including audience participation), and even once by a "chapter" involving dialogue from Alexander D'Agostino, who dances throughout the performance. The "plot," as it were, is loose; Simaetha, interpreted by my performance persona Dreambaby, weaves the story of the life of an immortal witch through various cyclical phases, drawing from the neopagan Maiden/Mother/Crone archetypes but reinterpreting these timelines as part of a repeating circle rather than a linear lifespan. Thus, the visual and sonic aesthetic of the play is anachronistic, reimagining Theocritus's Ancient Greek Idyll II (from which the play derives its title) as a ritual underscored with electronic composition, combining contemporary costuming with anecdotes and scenes from bygone eras, imposing modern language on ancient stories or classical language on contemporary ones. The themes of the play are heavy—misogyny, domestic abuse, societal other, suicide—but delivered with dark humor and culminating in a catharsis in which audience members are encouraged to burn symbolic representations of negative cycles in their own lives. 

Although technically SIMAETHA is most easily categorized as a theater piece and does involve a heavy amount of singing and dance, I have always envisioned it more as a performance art piece or a live storytelling experience as it shares little in common with the reigning aesthetics of musical theater or the conventions of experimental theater; it can more accurately be described as a persona performance pulling in elements of song, theater, and music to create something greater—and more haunting—than the sum of its parts. I perform all the music live either via piano or singing along to electronic compositions I created, often while Alexander D'Agostino supplements my music performance with his haunting, aesthetically singular movement; the music, while all electronically composed or played live by me, combined original songs ("The Witch's Lover" and "Fly Trap") with covers (such as "Black for the Occasion" and "Hope There's Someone" by queer artists Heidrik and Anhohni, respectively). Another major sonic component was spoken word poetry layered over top of electronic composition, which also served as sound for Alexander D'Agostino to interpret through dance. The show is an homage to queerness and gender fluidity, with D'Agostino flouting gendered dance norms with balletic pointe work, a reigning gamut of genderfluid costuming, and fluidity of pronoun use throughout. It is a gleeful culmination of many of the themes throughout my body of work. 

Laurence Ross of Bmore Art writes, “And what SIMAETHA gets precisely right is its most potent, thematic refrain: that a man as a savior is the greatest myth, the most foolish fantasy of all… Dialogue, poetry, cover song, choreography, and original score are woven together in a dynamic method of storytelling—and it’s worth noting that Budenz’s words and voice both ring, in intervals, with beauty and terror. These shifting modalities allow for not only surprise but for tragicomedy to emerge. In a show that deals with systemic abuse, gender inequality, femme discrimination, slut shaming, and ageism, deadpan humor and comedic juxtaposition manage to make enough room for laughter.”

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. 

For every single show included here, I was the primary organizer, coordinating with all the performers myself and, in the case of Zoom shows, both running and hosting the show entirely on my own. 

From 2013-2016, I was active in the Baltimore Performance Art scene. 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.