The Process

Anna and Maria Visited Russell…

in 2018 and conducted over 13 hours of interviews with members of the community who knew Trudy, in addition to working with community archivists to review newspapers articles and other materials from her life.

In 2019, while Maria worked on distilling their research into the opera’s libretto, Anna returned to Russell for the Festival’s 2019 season to showcase a some of her previous compositions.

COVID-19 made it impossible for Ad Astra to hold a full, in-person festival for our 2020 season — instead we took the festival virtual. The plan had been to bring both Anna and Maria in from Canada during our usual July summer season to complete the first workshop of some of the Opera material. With COVID preventing that kind of international travel impossible, the artists and festival staff designed a pandemic safe workshop experience, complete with COVID tests, Zoom presence, temperature checks and some extreme social distancing to take into account the additional projection potential singing entails.

You can learn more about how we accomplish a COVID safe workshop, and hear three of the songs from the upcoming opera in the Sneak Peek video from the 2020 Season.