Tulsa has no shortage of performance venues for a city its size: Cain's Ballroom, The Church Studio, Tulsa Performing Arts Center, LowDown, and a host of dive bars, to name a few. But in other less public haunts across the city, artists and musicians are creating alternative performance spaces that redefine the possibilities for experiencing art in Tulsa.
These spaces have one life during the day, then transform into intimate performance settings at night: basements turn into stages for local bands, homes become art galleries, porches host concert series. At any one of these shows, you could see your next favorite punk band, a stand-up comedian, multi-media artists, a classically-trained musician performing their favorite avant garde piece, or even get called up on stage yourself to share your own work.
Flying largely under the conventional events radar, this alternative model has persisted in Tulsa for decades, ebbing and flowing with the times. This particular moment is a pivotal one for spaces like these, which are uniquely vulnerable to shifting socioeconomic realities. Most often the project of one or two individuals, these venues can only exist as long as their owners are willing to invest time, money, space, and passion.
Vox Pop—a living-room-based event series run by Chris and Erin McCabe, featuring a potluck, a speaker, and a musical act for each show—just ended its run after eight years and nearly 70 shows as the McCabes move to focus more on family. The decade-old record label Cult Love has paused its house shows after six years of operation since one of its founders moved out of the house that served as the performance space. At the same time, newcomers like Trueson and Zia Daugherty’s Salon at the Parlour series, Eden Hemming and Brad Rose’s Bird House, Anne Pollard James’ Carson House, and racquetball-court-turned-concert-hall The Cave have all started to establish themselves as a new wave of private performance spaces, uniquely reflective of hyperlocal needs.
It’s not surprising that alternative art spaces are seeing a resurgence in a time of digital exhaustion and invasive capitalism. There are no economies of scale here: it’s impossible to fit more than a few dozen people in a house at once. There is no way to increase the price of admission without losing the intentionality and intimacy among organizers, attendees, and performers. There is no zero-sum competition between these venues, only collaboration and cross-pollination. And there are no virtual interactions, only very real ones.
The shapeshifting quality of these venues—home by day, performance space by night—makes it easier for them to exist financially. They can also allow for a wider range of types of art, since there isn’t a need to draw in a minimum crowd. Unlike bars or concert halls, they don’t need to book whatever act will bring the most bodies through the door so that they can make rent and cover expenses for the night.
And the spaces themselves are as diverse as their genre-pushing offerings. Venues like Barkingham Palace, Cult Love House, the Crawlspace, and the Chasement tap into a decades-old tradition of Tulsa house shows that stems from the DIY punk scene. Vox Pop, The Cave, Sperry Sounds, and the Owen Park Tiny Porch Concerts have staged more mainstream performances to appeal to a wider audience. The Parlour, ArtHouse Tulsa, Carson House, Queen Rose Art House, and the Bird House, among others, take the idea of a house-based venue beyond musical shows to include performance and installation art, classes, meet-ups, and other programming that creates a public space out of a private residence.
So what’s it like at a house-based show? I spoke with several of the organizers to get a better understanding of how these spaces operate and what they bring to the local arts ecosystem.