Each semester, we have the honor of profiling some of the incredible professional artists involved in our TDM productions. Our next artist spotlight this spring shines on Keenan Tyler Oliphant! Keenan is the director for the spring TDM production, The Singularity Play. Check out more of Keenan’s work at www.keenantyleroliphant.com.
What inspires you as an artist and creative?
I've always been interested in liminality, transition, and spaces of betweenness, even though I'm only beginning to be able to articulate it. I've come to realise that I'm in constant search of the expression of that state. I think it's somehow weirdly linked to my experience of being alive in this world, which has always felt transitory, but I keep reaching to and pulling from that space as a point of inspiration. I don't necessarily want to know it but rather want to ask people to share in it together.
What excites you about The Singularity Play?
Jay is such a fearless thinker and keeps pushing me to question and interrogate what I think I know about the world. The Singularity Play is complex and courageous in its questioning of humanity. It asks a lot of its audience but ultimately is a really heartfelt tribute to what it means to be alive. And yet it's an incredibly funny comedy! That excites me-- How the play can you make laugh and smile and be completely destabilised by the magnitude of its questions!
What has it been like collaborating with the team on this project?
Everyone on this play, besides Jay, are new collaborators for me so the process has been a wonderful act of forming community through the play. In particular, watching the student cast meet the complexities head-on has been exceptionally inspiring. Making new plays is difficult, especially because new plays are often still figuring themselves out, so when things are going slightly off the rails, it’s difficult to know exactly what the solution is. This ends up in a ton of experiments and changes, but the cast has been exceptional in their navigation of the process which is very new to most of them.
What projects are you working on next?
I've got a couple things in the pot at the moment that haven't been announced so I can't say specifics but after we close The Singularity Play I head back to my Associate Director position at Hadestown as well as working on a very exciting new bilingual piece that will have a premiere in New York later this year. Among them, I have a couple of workshops that I'll hopefully get to talk about soon.