PLENA IS WORK, PLENA IS SONG.

Plena is a Puerto Rican music and social happening with many analogies to the American Blues tradition. This film is our way of making a Plena in audiovisual images, based on oral story, sound, visual memories, and impressions. Featuring a generational cross-section of voices from the barrios where Plena was born and raised.

Plena connotes fullness of experience carved out of rudimentary materials and tools, transformed into percussive counterpoints stemming from the sounds of dried animal skins and scratching gourds, with lyrical and sardonic chorus of voices in call and response with a lead and changing storyteller's voice.