STONINGTON – When does a work of art become a work of art? How do artists know when their poetry, music or staging is completed? How do they know it works?

These were some of the questions raised last Thursday when a team of artists presented segments of a work-in-progress to a local audience at the Stonington Opera House. The first major commission by Opera House Arts, the producing arm of the opera house, “The Singing Bridge” is a chamber opera about Down East Maine, sexual abuse, class differences and family healing.

Its creators – the poet Beatrix Gates and the composer Anna Dembska – both have ties to Hancock County, where the fictional piece is set. They have been working together for the last two years on the libretto and score, and only recently brought Richard Edelman on board. He is a producer and director from New York City, and will begin staging the opera, which is slated to have a world premiere at the Stonington Opera House in July 2005.

“We are interested in creating new work that pushes the boundaries and is local,” said Linda Nelson, executive director of the Opera House. “We want to encourage work that speaks of and to our local culture.”

To stage “The Singing Bridge,” more than $50,000, and possibly as much as $100,000, is being budgeted. The Opera House’s entire budget for next season is currently $100,000. Opera House Arts is busily raising additional money to finance the project. Eventually, eight singers and nine musicians from Maine and New York City will be among the performers.

On Thursday, Opera House patrons, many of whom had attended a similar presentation last summer, heard the overture and several interludes, about a third of the opera. Seven singers and three musicians were onstage in plain clothes. The singers delivered their parts by simply standing to present lines of music or sometimes interacting with each other in small gestures.

In addition to drawing from the melodic sea shanty tradition, the music re-created the sounds of the coast: bell buoys, fluctuating rhythms, rugged and harsh tones. The overture opened with Nancy Ogle, a soprano who is also a professor of music at the University of Maine, stuttering in a haunting refrain: “T-t-t-t-t-t-tide.” If listeners were imagining the movement of seaweed in the currents, then the work’s spirit was captured.

During the interludes, they learned more about the story: how a young Maine girl is raped by a summer visitor and is forced to give up her child, who then returns to work in Maine as a teenager years later. There’s more to the story – the daughter also gets raped – but Gates didn’t want to give away the final plot. Instead, she wanted the audience to focus on the storytelling, a style of writing she developed after doing research at local historical societies and with oral histories told to her by community members.

After the musical presentations, Nelson led the audience in an informal feedback session, during which Dembska, Gates, Edelman and the singers became the listeners – this time to the audience. One person in the audience wanted to know more about the glaciology theme and its metaphoric meaning. Another asked if recorded sounds from the actual “Singing Bridge” – a noisy steel span that used to link the towns of Hancock and Sullivan and was replaced in recent years – would be used in the final score since it serves as the opera’s central symbol. One woman said she wished some of the music, which could easily be called postmodern, were more recognizable. Another said she felt the post-rape scene had been greatly improved since last year.

The artists attentively received both criticism and support, and helped the audience, including college professors, writers, neighbors in Stonington and people from as far away as Machias, to understand – and to participate in – the precarious processes of collaboration and creativity.

Several of the singers, who live in Maine, said they were pleased to have such work available to them in their own back yards. Others in the audience, including Sandy Phippen, the Maine writer and Hancock resident, said he was excited about the artistic representation of real Maine life. Maine is a popular setting for movies and novels, such as Phippen’s “Kitchen Boy,” but it isn’t often that an opera is set to the backdrop of coastal Maine.

Despite the difficulty of the music and the themes, the audience seemed immediately to take pride in a story about characters shaped from the annals of life Down East.

“In my training, I was involved in performance classes where we asked these kinds of questions,” said Dembska, who garnered a grant from Meet the Composers Inc. to help pay part of her salary. “The question wasn’t: Did you like it? But: What did you see? It’s so valuable to have someone with a blank slate see the work as it is being made. You tell them about it, and they tell you what they saw. That’s the best. You don’t have to take the suggestions. What you’re really looking for is a mirror.”

For Gates, who used to live in Hancock full time and now splits her time between Maine and New York City, the evening was about seeing her words taking physical shape.

“I was delighted to see so much of what I’ve imagined taking on three dimensions,” she said. “I heard people getting the jokes and that made me happy. I could also feel their tension. It was a tremendous response. I could feel them hanging in there with gasps of attention.”

While the memory of the music and story linger in the minds of the test audience, Gates, Dembska and Edelman will now charge full speed into the final stage of the three-year project. Meeting in New York City over the winter, they will shift, polish, rewrite, cast and stage the scenes, and then return to Maine next summer to present the completed work in Stonington, as well as at the University of Maine in Machias. They hope to present the opera elsewhere in Down East Maine and, if possible, in other communities outside of the state.

Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.