Explore the creation of Promised Land: An Adirondack Folk Opera
This series of Spotlight video stories and exclusive interview clips invites you behind-the-scenes and on the stage, as a work in progress aims to become a full scale opera.
Promised Land: An Adirondack Folk Opera (composer Glenn McClure, artistic director Helen Demong) was born out of one community’s desire to explore its unique place in our nation’s ongoing struggle for racial equality. Musicians, artists, scholars, educators, students and grandparents have come together to retell this courageous, pre-Civil War voting rights story.
Black families moved to the rugged Adirondack Mountains to build farms and to claim their right to vote. Our story follows both visionary men and quiet, strong women that struggled against a forbidding landscape and the headwinds of institutional racism. Both the love of country and the love of husband of wife are tested in this timely drama.
