Alma's Engine
conducted by eppchez yo-sí yes
Alma's Engine
conducted by eppchez yo-sí yes
Welcome!
I asked for a bucket of transparent paint to coat the black box
of my creative process. All I got was this stylish website template.
A bulletin board for sharing projects | A sounding board for developing ideas.
A soul's engine chugs along... Research... Invent... Let it ripen.... Invent... Perform...
Eyeball around the brain shits | Book me to perform or speak | Check out where my work will be
PLAY WITH ME!
In abundance,
&> eppchez yo-sí yes
Upcoming Work
tHEATre
Publik Private is having two public readings this summer! Play Penn and The Sol Project have teamed up to produce development readings for an expanded new version of this work. July 23 in Philadelphia and August 29 in New York City (RSVP). A bouncy house of ancestral existentialism.
As Friend in Residence at Haverford College, eppchez will be performing original songs and choreography in early October. More info soon!
Currently Available Work:
Guided Transmutation! This is a new audio experiment, kind of like a guided meditation but a little more active, asking participants to learn about the somatic/embodied experience of transformational decision points.
Appear To Me: A new site-specific audio play by Eppchez! Written for Swimpony Performing Arts’ exciting project Trailoff. This app contains 10 plays that are site-specific to different walking trails around South Eastern Pennsylvania.
A new collaboration with Applied Mechanics, Other Orbits is happening now! This multi-modal serial performance piece will run from 2021-2023 with episodes in many different formats, from a radio station to a tabletop role-playing game to a comic book, all telling an epic story of ecological reckoning and cultural survival that will culminate in a live performance in the Spring of 2023.
The filmed version of Publik Private is available to stream. This iteration of Eppchez’s solo historical inquiry through clown and puppetry was made possible through Boston University. The film debuted for students and faculty at BU in late October 2020. Contact Alma’s Engine with an inquiry to access the video for personal use. If your organization is interested in sharing this exciting new theater/film hybrid, book a screening!!!
My play They Extract! is featured on the Theater Viscera Podcast. Listen to the episode
gender expansive design
Darb Garb is an applied puppetry project to create wearable, gender-affirming artwork. Commissions are open.
Euphorm is a new company founded to produce trans affirming, shape-shifting designs. As a founding designer, eppchez is excited to make eir novel chest binding garment widely available.
Tabling & Talks
Watch Eppchez’s keynote “Repairing Broken harmfully designed Foundations” to Quakers at Philadelphia Yearly Meeting 2022
eppchez brings Darb Garb to trans art markets and conferences all over. upcomming:
Theater
Theater
train-ing: a one troll show
Watch the trailer!!!
Hey, do you know of any grassroots campaigns organizing passionately to protect our planet from ourselves? Help connect me to them! Lets organize a ton of fundraisers for these heroes of the anthropocene.
Contact Alma's Engine to scheduled a site specific performance for your group.
Any bridge that goes over a river will do.
Publik private
Click the show poster for production history and documentation
Some private things - if we want to live - have to be made public - in the way that our bodies become public when we go outside where we will be perceived.
In this bilingual solo performance I explore the lives of two trans ancestors who made space for themselves in their own absurd eras. The three of us have a lot of processing to share.
They Extract
Click the show poster for production history and documentation.
"They Extract!" is a full length work of physical theater that explores how commodification changes the resources that are most precious to us. Oil has been gone and Love™ is extracted as an energy source. The play follows a scientist and father, Vera his daughter, and the Loving Mine she falls for.
Junk Redemption
Click the show poster for production history and documentation.
A Baltimore art gallery "discovers" an isolated self-taught sculptor living in a secluded forest clearing. semi-magical world where their trauma lives in their sculptures, that are brought to life by the ghost of their twin brother. when a
Workshops & in progress
off-white:a querying of unearned advantage
This workshop uses songs, story telling and worship sharing to help communities already engaged in confronting systemic White Supremacy, to become more comfortable with the inherent discomfort of this work, and embrace the joyful parts of engaging with transformation of self and institutional structures in your in daily life. I use my own experiences and reflections as a White-passing person to notice how Whiteness functions in my life and invite participants into a vulnerable space of reflection around this topic that we have been so carefully taught to ignore.
Gravity Play:
I think that hills are very exciting! Gravity functions differently on hills making bodies move in strange and disorienting ways, tickling my thoughts - provoking metaphors. I would like to explore how to use hills to talk about bias and micro aggression. I would like to explore how to use hills to talk about other things too. I would like to explore how this metaphor changes during different seasons - with different surfaces: grass, leaves, snow, mud. This is probably a film.
Non-binary Burlesque
Topsy Pendejo is chaffing at the bits, inventing a theory of sexiness that is not about gender. Between burlesque, drag, boylesque, and lounge crooning there must be something else. I'm imagining a form where my glitter-phobic feral troll soul can really let fly, where my enthusiasm for designing whimsical prosthetic parts joins with movement and song parody. Audiences may surprise themselves!
Music
Music
experiments in vocal looping:
Developing new Sets
I have a slew of new songs. Haunting, weird, hard and heartfelt music, ready to play at your venue or house show. This track is a live recording of that bergeoning sound.
ImproMptunes
An ongoing performance project. Improvising music in collaboration with audience passersby. Using the sounds of the street to inspire beats, and the thoughts, prayers and overheard conversations of strangers to build lyrics and melody.
past singer-songwritery sounds
Self-Realized-Nation: a song cycle
released 03 July 2013
These songs came out of my observations of the Occupy movement from where I stood in 2011 on the periphery. Though 4 years later I sometimes forget that there was ever such a buzz I still believe that the true possibilities and the undeniable pitfalls represented in these songs are important to recall. The questions in these songs have guided me though many a crisis of purpose and I hope they can be helpful to others as well.
They taught me to say thank you.
Random recordings
Click on the album art to listen and download my music on my bandcamp. You can name your own price.
Interested in licensing? collaborating? covering? Please contact me with any questions about my music.
Here is a cover of my song Lonely from my dear friend BJ also known as Orkinpod.
Songs in the key of free
a series of composer/musician workshops at SCI-Graterford in which Philly musicians and songwriters develop and celebrate the musical talent of incarcerated men via performance-based classes in composing, arranging, and musicianship.
Live performance videos & radio spots
Niijii Radio's Infinite Underground: Call-in interview from 2013
Hear me talk about my music and my philosophy of song-writing and self then you might enjoy listening to this.
Video & Visual
Video & Visual
Darb Garb: wearable Art for gender expansive life
Accepting commissions. Visit Darb Garb to explore this ongoing art project, working with gender non-conforming people to design and create functional art objects and clothing design to affirms gender expansive bodes.
Pollination
This is the first in a series of queer EROTIC films about pollination. You have been warned 😈
KpatsaPatsaAtsaTsaSaA
Cleaning
a puppet demonstration in solidarity with the custodial staff at Wesleyan university.
Writing
Writing
Poems
A collection of recent poems.
Plays
Read my work on the New Play Exchange or request a pdf
They Extract!
A play about the limits of commodification.
The Peony Pavilion
An adaptation of Xianzu Tang's 16th century opera.
Junk Redemption
A play about art, grief, and the ghosts trying to keep us honest.
46 Amboy St.
Three braided stories curious about family planning in 1916.
Press
Press
There are many ways to help me make art sustainably. This is just one way. 100% of all donations will go to my artistic endeavors. If you are interested in supporting a specific project you can specify that in a note after choosing the amount you'd like to donate.