The Dust Bowl isnt some ancient, remote event. The environmental disaster destroyed farmland and displaced populations across the southern U.S. plains less than 100 years ago, including in the Texas Panhandle 500 miles from Dallas.

Searching for subject matter for his choral groups next project, Verdigris Ensemble artistic director Sam Brukhman became interested in the story of dust storms that could turn day into night, in part because the devastation hit so close to home and shows signs of returning amid climate change and the human penchant for folly.

A major climatic event happened in our back yard, and were not talking about it at all, says Brukhman, who conceived the new work Dust Bowl on the suggestion of a friend.

He collaborated with filmmakers, a composer and librettist, bluegrass musicians and his singers to create a multimedia performance premiering Feb. 27-29 in the Arts District with an additional date March 1 in Fort Worth.

This is probably one of the most relevant things weve ever done because its happening as we speak all over the world, not with the frequency that it did in the 30s, but still happening, he says in an interview. Even in the Panhandle, dust storms still occur. Its part of Texas history. Its also a great dialogue to start having about how man-made and environmental catastrophe can happen with a combination of human error and natural events.

For instance, todays Australian bush fires have produced dangerous dust clouds. During the Great Depression, a combination of droughts and the introduction of modern farming techniques led to unprecedented erosion. The natural grasslands that were good at trapping moisture during the dry season had been replaced with cultivated cropland that exposed the topsoil.

Brukhman is interested in locating these larger questions in Dallas history and present-day culture. Last season, Verdigris Faces of Dallas told the stories of residents in ways that connected them to the citys often difficult past. The group also has performed avant-garde composer Julia Wolfes Anthracite Fields, which deals with the lives of Pennsylvania coal miners.

The son of Soviet immigrants and a transplant from central New Jersey, he formed Verdigris in 2017 with the goal of commissioning and performing relevant, contemporary choral music. This year, he quit his middle-school teaching job to focus on the ensemble.

For Dust Bowl, Brukhman immersed himself in the literature and other media that documented the era. John Steinbecks novel The Grapes of Wrath is probably the most famous, along with Dorothea Langes black-and-white photographs of displaced families and Pare Lorentzs 1936 documentary The Plow That Broke the Plains.

He watched Ken Burns 2012 series and read Timothy Egans book The Worst Hard Time. Last summer, Ron Witzke, director of vocal studies and opera at William Jewell College in Liberty, Mo., outside Kansas City, another area hit by the Dust Bowl, traveled the Texas Panhandle and surroundings to gather telling anecdotes for the libretto.

Brukhman met Witzke through another William Jewell professor, director of choral studies Anthony J. Maglione, who composed the score for Dust Bowl. It includes bluegrass music performed live by a band. The piece also features projected documentary footage compiled by filmmakers Camron and Courtney Ware and piles of sand that Brukhman obtained from a touring production of Once on This Island, the Broadway show that recently played the Winspear Opera House. Dust Bowl will be performed in Winspears Hamon Hall.

In newspaper articles and other historical documents containing eyewitness accounts, Witzke discovered scenarios that spoke to the extreme situations that people found themselves in. In Dalhart, Texas, for example, oilfield firefighter and charlatan Tex Thornton convinced locals to pay him the equivalent of $1 million today to launch dynamite into the air on the claim that it would produce rain.

There are moments in this libretto that really give you a sense of the type of characters that were around in the Dust Bowl, Brukhman explains. When people first saw the dust storms, they thought it was the end of the world. We deal with what that felt like.

After the minimalist first movement, The Promise, sets up the environmental dilemma, the Verdigris singers become the residents of Dalhart in the second section, The Peril. That includes protagonists like Thornton and events like the clubbing of jackrabbits that arrived en masse. The choir imitates the eras warning sirens and coughs to convey the effects of the dust.

The towns mayor is quoted about the peril as if its worthy of a tout: Let us all in stentorian tones boast of our terrific and mighty sandstorms and mighty end of a people, a city and a country that can meet the test of courage and still smile, even though we might be choking and our throats and nostrils so laden with dust that we cannot give voice to our feelings.

The third section, The Prophecy, asks whether weve learned from our mistakes without coming to its own conclusion, Brukhman says. At the time, some clergyman blamed sinful human behavior for the disaster.

We start and end at the same place, and we let the audience decide. The three movements, based on Handels Messiah, represent the cycle of human error and the nature cycle. And like the never-ending cycle of our disasters, we could just keep going, doing it forever.

Manuel Mendoza is a Dallas freelance writer and former staff critic at The Dallas Morning News.

Feb. 27-29 at 7:30 p.m. at Hamon Hall, 2403 Flora St., Dallas. $29. March 1 at 7:30 p.m. at St. Stephen Presbyterian Church, 2700 McPherson Ave., Fort Worth. Free. 214-880-0202. verdigrismusic.org. attpac.org.

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Devastation hits close to home in 'Dust Bowl,' a warning from Dallas' Verdigris Ensemble that it could happen again - The Dallas Morning News