They've sung at the United Nations and in Carnegie Hall, performed compositions by k.d. lang and Holly Near. They've expanded the body of music for, by, and about women by commissioning nearly 20 works - among them a piece by Jennifer Higdon in the 1990s, long before the Philadelphia resident won this year's Pulitzer Prize in music composition.
And this weekend the choir will mark its 35th anniversary with a concert Saturday evening in Center City and another Sunday afternoon in Germantown.
Its 35 members will sing in Bulgarian and Spanish as well as English, in harmony and hip-hop style, a cappella and accompanied by piano.
The wide-ranging program will feature a quartet singing "37 Bumper Stickers," by Judith Palmer, who has been an off-and-on Anna since the choir's inception in 1975. Sage Bleakney, the 23-year-old son of choir member Tracy Bleakney, got special dispensation, by virtue of his mother's involvement, to provide the beatboxing (vocal percussion) behind the hip-hop number "What's Up With That?"
American Sign Language interpretation of the entire program will be done by James Rowe, an Abington native and University of the Arts grad who learned sign language to have a role with the choir. Rowe, 46, commutes from New York City to volunteer with Anna Crusis. As a gay man, he says, "I never dreamed they'd let me participate unless I went trans."
(He's joking. But one Anna did become a man after leaving the group.)
To conclude the program, a hundred or more former Annas will join the choir in "Bread and Roses," a 1911 poem that became the theme of the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Mass., and was set to music in 1976 by Mimi Fariña.
"Once an Anna, always an Anna," says Coren, who directs vocal music at the George School in Bucks County.
