The Pickup's Arts & Culture coverage is supported by Brut Hotel, featuring a rooftop VIP after party for Tulsa Irish Fest on March 14.
You might think there's not much in common between Bruce Goff's Art Deco 1920s aesthetic and experimental music in 2026. Enter Todd Woodlan, who's been helping Tulsa rethink quite a few well-worn categories since he moved here five years ago, both with his own music project A Thousand Plateaus and with the radically welcoming, community building open mic noise events put on by ONE AUX, which he co-founded with Carl Antonowicz. (Read our review of just one of that organization's many musical adventures here.)
On March 13, at 7pm and 11pm, Woodlan will premiere a composition he wrote specifically for the Tulsa Spotlight Theater. "Architectural Counterpoint"—featuring Tulsa musicians Ashley Apodaca, Chazlen Rook, Cheyenne McCoy, Matt Ziegler, and Nathan Glaser, all of whom play in multiple local music projects—takes inspiration from the building's design, its century-old history, its lost murals, its community lore, and the quirky realities of its current-day life. This immersive musical experience, made with support from the Artists Creative Fund, will take listeners throughout the space (even into the basement), and it promises to be as thoughtful, whimsical, and generative as Goff's own work. Ahead of the show, we spoke with Woodlan about the process of making music for—and with—the Spotlight.
Alicia Chesser: How did you first encounter this space? What was your response the first time you walked in there?
Todd Woodlan: I came to Tulsa with Tulsa Remote in 2021, and one of the things on their list of stuff to do is to go to the Spotlight Theater and see The Drunkard. So I went and said, oh, this is a really cool little theater, and then forgot about it for a little while. It was always on the back burner—like, it'd be cool to do an event there, because it's a neat, historic space. Then a couple years ago, I went to an event there with The Links and some other people, and the space was totally transformed: indie band, noise, lights and fog machines. It was packed with people, really cool. Later I got a tour of all the rooms that were upstairs that were the old living quarters, and got to go down under the space and see the tunnel. There's so many other parts to this building beyond just the stage. A lot of them were kind of in disrepair, but you could tell the kind of magic that was there and all the history that was in the building.
And I was like, this is wild. This feels like a “space activation” sort of art project that needs to happen.
AC: Have you done this kind of site-specific composition in the past in other places?
TW: I have a background in installation sculpture, so I would make site-specific sculptures. A lot of the music practice that I do is improvisational, so it's not necessarily site-specific in that it has to be in a particular place, but each performance is unique in the sense that it's like one point in time in a place, wherever it is. I've done performances doing things like running microphones from outside into the building and processing that, or taking field recordings in a particular place and looping over that. So it's kind of an opportunity to merge those two practices a little bit more, in a more meshed way. The Artists Creative Fund grant has allowed me to do this at a larger scale than what I've done before.