The Garden Theater’s summer 2026 renovations will provide the raw material for a concert at the Columbus venue. On October 6, at 7 p.m., Chicago-based contemporary music ensemble Beyond This Point will perform a Columbus-specific edition of its touring piece Reclaimed Timber at the theater’s Moonlight Studio, using percussion instruments made from an old wooden door and two-by-fours removed from the building.
The performance adapts composer Michael Gordon’s percussion work Timber, written for six unspecified percussion instruments and described as having a stark palette of sound. WOSU Public Media reports that Beyond This Point follows Gordon’s score precisely while changing the materials for each community where it performs. For the Columbus edition, the Garden Theater supplied salvaged wood from its own building.
The salvaged pieces came from different parts of the theater: the wooden door was in a basement area, and the two-by-fours came from an old sound booth. They will be played as percussion instruments during the concert, part of the New Music at Short North Stage series presented by the Johnstone Fund for New Music.
A Building With Many Past Lives
The Garden Theater has had several uses over the years, including as a burlesque house, movie theater and church. Its current renovation gives some material from that building a new role: the door and framing lumber will be used to make instruments for the Columbus performance.
Another Columbus Theater’s Changing Uses
A separate local example comes from the Lincoln Theatre. According to the Columbus Association for the Performing Arts, audiences went there for films, vaudeville and jazz from the 1930s to the early 1960s; the building’s second-floor Ogden Club was later renamed the Lincoln Ballroom and became a prominent live-jazz venue. The Lincoln’s documented timeline offers a comparison in changing theater uses, while the Garden’s history here includes burlesque, movies and church use—and, now, reclaimed materials from its renovation.
Local sourcing is part of the ensemble’s approach to Reclaimed Timber. Composer and ensemble member Adam Rosenblatt has said that each stop brings a new set of instruments drawn from a place meaningful to that community. For the project’s first performance, in Baltimore in 2019, he sourced wood from abandoned row houses.
Lanterns Tell the Story of What's Disappearing
The Columbus concert will also feature hundreds of illuminated paper lanterns. For the original Baltimore performance, artists Jenn Figg and Matthew McCormack made 200 lanterns modeled on the city’s row houses.
For Columbus, Figg is designing lanterns based on demolished buildings in Whitehall, endangered structures in downtown Columbus and native Franklin County plants, including American black elderberry, common buttonbush and dense blazing star. Figg has described natural and human-made features as part of a collective memory that changes or disappears as cities change—an idea reflected in both the lantern designs and the locally salvaged instruments.
Beyond This Point has performed Reclaimed Timber in 17 communities nationwide, including Baltimore, Seattle, Phoenix, Flagstaff and Chicago, using wood offered by each local community. In Columbus, the Garden Theater’s salvaged materials connect the traveling work to the building’s own history and its latest renovation.
