The Cyclorama: Battle in the Round

Lyrics

Step into the circle.
Let your eyes adjust.
The air is still, heavy with the scent of old canvas and oil paint.
History is waiting.

Eighteen eighty-six.
Not here, not in the red Georgia dirt.
But in Milwaukee.
German hands, who never heard this cannon's roar firsthand.
Forty-two feet high.
A canvas sky filled with someone else's war.
A memory they had to invent, brushstroke by brushstroke.

And the battle unfolds.
All around you.
Three hundred and fifty-eight feet of smoke and fury.
A perfect circle of a single, terrible afternoon in July.
Stand in the center.
You are the witness now.
This is the Cyclorama.

See how the sculpted clay of the diorama
bleeds into the painted horizon.
A clever trick of the eye, isn't it?
And there... that general, so confident on a horse he never actually rode.
A small lie, for a grander truth.
A detail lost in the telling.
The artists painted a story, not a report.

And the battle unfolds.
All around you.
Three hundred and fifty-eight feet of smoke and fury.
A perfect circle of a single, terrible afternoon in July.
Stand in the center.
You are the witness now.
This is the Cyclorama.

This whole grand illusion was bound for Minneapolis, you know.
A traveling truth, looking for a home.
It found one here, in Grant Park.
And in two thousand and seventeen, we gave it a new life.
Wiped away the dust.
Corrected the general's horse.
We are always tending to our histories.
Even the beautiful, painted ones.

The lights go down.
The painted soldiers hold their breath.
Forever July twenty-second.
Forever fighting a war that's long since over.
A monumental, magnificent mistake.