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Title
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POWELL: Performing History, Technology, and Environment in the American West
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Description
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For my MS Thesis, I produced an original immersive theatre experience entitled POWELL (2025), based on John Wesley Powell’s (infamous) 1869 surveying expedition through the Grand Canyon. The performance was staged in Fort Douglas 618a– originally constructed as military barracks in the 1870s, the building now hosts the Environmental Humanities program, my home department.
POWELL juxtaposed multiple (often uncomfortable) narratives of American expansion, highlighting Powell as a charismatic explorer who framed the Western landscape as a sublime yet conquerable frontier. The venue itself became the crew's nightly camp on the bank of the Colorado River, simultaneously representing the haunting legacy of westward expansion’s most violent tools, Fort Douglas having served, for example, as deployment grounds for the soldiers who perpetrated the 1863 Bear River Massacre against the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation.
The show’s audience members moved freely among actors, individually choosing their own path. In this image, George Bradley (Jason Hogue ‘27) contends with the expedition’s immense danger. The picture highlights the relationship between the natural world and the troubled human impulse to surveil and exploit it, made evident by the usage of live-camera footage cast onto monitors throughout the building, as seen in the background.
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Date
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2026-01-24
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Creator
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Mahler, Evan
