NEIL ROLNICK + ALEX OLIVA / PLONSEY SCHEME

WEST OAKLAND SOUND SERIES

NEIL ROLNICK performs So Many Me's, with choreographer and dancer ALEX OLIVA (and her 8 foot ladder). measuring ... selling ... falling apart ... acting out ... surrender ... Neil also performs the score to Barbara Hammer's 1990 experimental film Sanctus, featuring a host of x-ray skeletons playing trumpets, drinking, shaking hands, shaving, putting on lipstick, all to the live mashup of Sanctus movements from masses by Machaut, Bach, Beethoven & Verdi.

“Plonsey Scheme” has nothing to do with finding suckers to invest in this “music” thing which promises to be such a hot commodity, with the fraudster paying off older investors with the funds provided by the younger ones -- but as we get older it is admittedly a little more like it: what experiences, revelations and revolutions can we promise you? MANTRA PLONSEY writes the words while DAN PLONSEY writes the music, but it comes together for the first (and last) time during performance. The music is written to accommodate improvisations utilizing various constraints, miniature compositions within compositions, fragments of songs from Eastern Europe and Northern El Cerrito. The band includes bagpipes virtuoso MATTHEW WELCH (also accordion and Balinese suling), clarinet/saxophone/flutist CORY WRIGHT (also trombone), guitarist TOMEK SINCLAIR, and MIC GENDREAU on turntables, electronics and percussion (and perhaps clarinet). Mantra sings and speaks, Dan plays reeds, brass, melodica, and bits of cheap percussion. And KATTT ATCHLEY provides a backdrop of projected tableaux of dolls among art: in movement along with their lighting on a system of turntables and lazy susans. PLONSEY SCHEME is eery, majestic, lost, mysterious, ceremonial, and more/less than just there.

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