Text as evidence.
The libretto draws from newspaper articles, diaries, and first-hand oral accounts, keeping the performance close to lived testimony.
case study / historical storytelling / theatre
Dust Bowl
A fully staged historical account of the 1930s environmental disaster, built with voice, bluegrass band, projection, choreographed movement, and raw documentary text.
Artistic question
How can a historical disaster become a live, embodied account instead of an illustration? Dust Bowl turns archive into room-scale testimony: singers surrounded by audience, projection behaving like weather, and first-hand accounts pressing against the present tense.
The piece asks how a man-made environmental crisis was allowed to happen, whether we have learned from it, and what communal listening can do when history is staged as something still moving through the air.
Experience
Image as weather.
Projection turns the stage into a charged landscape, surrounding the singers with dust, memory, and historical pressure.
The audience is inside the account.
The staging turns the concert into a theatrical environment, with the audience close enough to feel implicated in the telling.
Performance excerpt
Two working excerpts from the staged production: Tex Thornton's testimony as a live scene, and the chorus moving through dust, projection, and ensemble pressure.
System
55minutes
2020world premiere
2024Dallas return
1Elevator Project partnership
Dust Bowl combines Anthony J. Maglione's music with a bluegrass band, video projection, choreographed movement, English subtitles, and a documentary text world drawn from the people who lived through the crisis.
Media + recognition
Devastation hits close to home in Dust Bowl, a warning from Dallas' Verdigris Ensemble that it could happen again
read articleDust Bowl returned to Dallas at the Wyly Theatre after a sold-out 2020 premiere
view projectWATCH: Verdigris Ensemble Uses Artificial Intelligence to Create Projections
read featureAT&T Performing Arts Center's Elevator Project keeps rising in its fifth year
read articleProject details
- Historical storytelling / immersive projection / theatre
- Newspaper articles, diaries, and first-hand oral accounts
- Bluegrass band / video projection / choreographed movement
- World premiere at Hamon Hall inside Winspear Opera House
- Presented as part of AT&T Performing Arts Center's Elevator Project
- Returned to Dallas at the Wyly Theatre in 2024
- Music by Anthony J. Maglione
- Performed by Verdigris Ensemble
- Projection work by Courtney Ware and Lightware Labs