Natacha Diels / Dave Broome / Mark Southerland
Drifters Theater
January 7, 2026
Tulsa’s got a lot of big arts and culture events on the horizon in the first half of 2026: a Nine Inch Nails blowout at the BOK Center, Ethel Cain at (no relation) Cain’s, a new production of Oklahoma!, and the triumphant return of Hot Wheels Live, to name a few. Looking out at the largesse to come, I decided to make my first art experience of the new year as niche as possible, like snuggling into the tiniest nest at the center of a set of Matryoshka dolls. Give me a minute to gather myself before I go out and get blasted by Trent Reznor, Ado Annie, and Gunkster, okay?
Pretty quickly after it opened last year, Owen Park’s Drifters Theater became one of my favorite places to escape to. Good people, sweet patio, Tulsa skyline in the distance, roaring fire in the firepit, hot tea and apple cider, creaky old church pews to sit on while listening to fresh sounds created by some of the most interesting musicians in Tulsa and beyond—if you’re looking for a music experience unlike anything else in the city, an evening at Drifters is a great bet. Some shows here are loud and heavy, some are more quietly meditative; all will have you thinking about them for a good long while after you head home.
The first event of the year at Drifters, a $15 Wednesday night foray into some extraordinary musical worlds, still has me in a trance 36 hours later. Hosted by Dave Broome—a Manhattan School of Music-trained pianist and composer who’s been wowing Tulsa’s new music lovers with his technologically innovative work for quite a few years now—the show was full of wide-ranging wonders performed by three adventurous and uncategorizable talents: Natacha Diels, Mark Southerland, and Broome himself.
Diels might not be someone you’ve heard of, but her star is rising in the world of global experimental music. An assistant professor of music at the University of Pennsylvania, she’s composed work for ensembles like the JACK Quartet and festivals from Buenos Aires to Norway. Musical America magazine has described her as “a tour de force of reckless imagination and confident craft,” and critic Steve Smith calls her music “brilliant, bananas in the best sense, elegant, eloquent, and loopy.” She and Broome are both members of the internationally acclaimed Ensemble Pamplemousse, founded in New York City in 2003.
Stopping in Tulsa on a tour that will take her to Ireland and England later this spring, Diels opened the Drifters evening with “Am I Alive,” a solo set for (among other elements) voice, tiny music boxes, theremin, and what she’s described as “dismembered metronomes” and “half-remembered conversations with machine friends.” Her delicate rig looked a bit like the top of my late grandma’s vanity, and her gestures with these little objects had the careful touch of someone doing a private homemade ritual. Sitting in low light, over a burbling, twittering undersong, Diels began by tinkling bells and coaxing an operatic vibrato out of tuning forks set onto a sound board. As a pink glow washed over the stage, this sweet sonic nonsense continued to hang in the air as she shifted into rhythmically off-kilter pings with a xylophone mallet and, in a clear, simple voice, took us through some moments of a day, a life, a cosmos.
From “This is how I make my coffee” and “This is where I order Szechuan takeout,” to (Diels now standing, fully lit) “What comes before me in the encyclopedia?” and “Would I rather be invisible or fly?” to “When will I grow up?” and “When did I die?”—Diels’ notes and queries bore a quizzical, serious tone, flickering between innocence and experience like a 21st-century William Blake. As those wound-up metronome bits ticked down above a plaintive theremin, these textual glimmers built, one by one, toward a final sequence of astonishing clarity: a vision of art (and life, too) as a series of scraps and worries and foibles that, joined together by a loving hand, can light up a whole world.
I might have actually gone to another world for a second, because the next thing I knew, Broome was honking into an industrial face mask and banging on a speaker with light-responsive sound gloves and plugging fluorescent cables into a synthesizer, and Southerland—an endlessly joyful experimental horn player—was playing two saxophones at once after giving us an analog experience of surround sound by standing behind the crowd blowing into a flailing plastic tube. This duo set was a lumbering, hilarious, virtuosic interlude that scrambled my brain with rhythmic shocks, warp-speed echoes out of nowhere, and a full array of squawks and whirrs and electric charges that went nowhere and everywhere at once.
A few minutes later, with Southerland and Broome both breathing hard after some seriously fun exertion, Broome composed himself at a keyboard to close the night with his own arrangement of a piano piece by Morton Feldman, one of the most influential 20th-century composers in the orbit of John Cage. “Palais de Mari” (1986) was Feldman’s last work for solo piano, an exquisite distillation of his lifelong experiments with duration, reverberation, and improvisation.
Did we spend 20 minutes or 20,000 years in the world of these “sea palaces,” in Broome’s hands? Time seemed to hover motionless as the crowd stilled to a profound silence, all of us hanging on every drop of Broome’s finger to a key. Single notes wavered like water; tinkles and shimmers radiated from each chord. Free-associating, I imagined the shadows of cats in alleyways; photopsias; the inside of a cave. I wanted the last note to never come. When it did, a room full of friendly faces met me as I drifted into the night.
An evening like this might not be everyone’s idea of a good time, but for me, it was exactly the kind of experience I’m craving more of this year: one where the highest levels of craft meet the rumpled reality of living, where the invitation is to slow way down, unhook my attention from cacophonous slop and callous stupidity, and allow my senses, brain, and heart to sink into more skillful ways of being. In between the blockbuster shows, try to get yourself to Drifters Theater a time or two this year. It might just be the reset you didn’t know you needed.
