Dan Plonsey
Dan Plonsey was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and raised in Cleveland Heights. He has lived in California for 24 years, and in El Cerrito for 14.
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Since 1978, Plonsey has written hundreds of works for large and small ensembles. He has received commissions from: The Jewish Music Festival (Berkeley), Dandelion DanceTheater (Oakland), Real Time Operai (New Hampshire), the Bang on a Can People's Commissioning Fund (New York), Theatre of Yugen (San Francisco), the Museum of Children's Art (Oakland), Milkbar International Film Festival (Oakland), the Berkeley Symphony Children's Concert Series, and New Music Works (Santa Cruz).
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Most of Plonsey's work has been written without commission, deadline, or any significant outside influence for Daniel Popsicle, his 10-20 person ensemble of unfixed instrumentation.
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Text excerpted from his website - http://www.danplonsey.com/
Randy Hussong
Randy Hussong creates sculptural installations combining suites of objects, both two and three dimensional, that synthesize art historical and pop references with social, political, comical and sensual realities. His work incorporates print strategies, repetition and DIY fabrication from mixed materials. He received the James D. Phelan Art Award for Printmaking in 2007 and the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California in 2008-2009. where he teaches printmaking and sculpture.
Hussong's current projects examines unhoused communities in the Bay Area.
Randy Hussong website.
Suki O'Kane
Suki O'Kane is an Oakland-based musician, composer, public artist and intermedia curator. Since 1996 she has been developing temporary public art projects that emphasize the fleeting and seek to catalyze highly personal transformations in unexpected places. Her work now focuses on the transformation of civic spaces with the ephemeral tools of light and sound, organized as collaborative, improvisational practice. She is the founder of The Illuminated Corridor, a nomadic public art project that creates creates site-specific illumination of public space by drawing on local traditions of film and live music.
She curated and produced Music by the Eyeful, the San Francisco-based gallery performance series that featured inventions in visual audio. As a collaborator with Neighborhood Public Radio, she curated and presented NOVA, a culminating event of NPR’s exhibition American Life at the 2008 Whitney Biennial.
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Suki is currently developing site-specific works for Oakland, San Francisco, and West Marin while collaborating with Bay Area initiatives committed to creative engagement in civic spaces.
Text from Suki O’Kane website
Ward Spangler
Ward Spangler is an active musician throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, performing diverse styles of music. He is Principal Percussionist with the Berkeley Symphony, Oakland East Bay Symphony, Fremont Symphony, and is a member of the Marin Symphony. Ward is also a member of the Cabrillo Music Festival of Contemporary Music, performing as Principal Percussionist with conductors Dennis Russell Davies, John Adams, and Marin Alsop. He has also performed with the San Francisco Symphony, Santa Rosa Symphony, Symphony Silicon Valley, and California Symphony.
Ward has long been interested in the idea of playing music in conjunction with yoga, one of his other passions. In 2018 he was able to collaborate with Lilia Roman and Anja Borgstrom and has developed his own sound bath experience.
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Text excerpted from Ward Spangler website.
Cory Wright
Reeds player Cory Wright, educated at Oberlin College
and the University of Southern California, has been involved
in both the jazz and creative music worlds for the past 20 years, including time spent in New York, Los Angeles and his
current home in the San Francisco bay area.
His recent projects reflect his interest in blurring the
distinction between composed and improvised material and in combining the harmonious with the atonal, and groovewith the arrhythmic.
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Cory has played in ensembles lead by Anthony Braxton, Vinny Golia, Eddie Gale, Adam Rudolph and Yusef Lateef. He is currently a member of bay area groups Bristle, Wiener Kids, the Nathan Clevenger Group and the Oakland Active Orchestra, and leads his own projects Green Mitchell and the Cory Wright Outfit
Text from Cory Wright website.
Mantra Plonsey
Brooklyn-born Mantra Plonsey is an Intuition Engineer at EnChroma, and Artistic Director and Writer at Sugarglass Consort performance lab.
She writes: "I write plays. I write music. I sing. I teach. I direct.
"I play around with swords and such. I make movies.
"When I'm lucky, i meet up with new people and get inspired to do more and new of it all – perform, choreograph, move, evolve as a collaborator (with hope)."
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She has appeared in many productions by director George Coates, most recently in Twit Wit Radio on KPFA. She has also appeared in films by Les Blank and Rob Nilsson. As a singer, Mantra sang in Kitka, the Enormous Ensemble, and has led several bands of her own.
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She lives in El Cerrito with her two sons, their father Dan and a dog.