Who Needs a Backup Plan?

Keenan Tyler Oliphant from Columbia University News article by Nicole Saldarriaga

Last week, I spent a lot of time looking at the job of the Director for my Theatre Appreciation open educational resource textbook. I learned that this job only emerged in the West in the nineteenth century. Before that, job duties associated with a director might have gone to an actor, a teacher, the playwright, or even an older family member.

In ancient Greece, the playwright led the coordination of a production. They were called the Didaskalos, which means “teacher,” rather than director. In medieval times in Europe, the leader of a production was called the Master. The idea was that they had already “mastered” the job of acting, so they could be in charge of teaching the rest of the troupe how to bring together a story.

In Japanese Noh theatre today, direction and acting techniques are passed down from father to son within theater families, as they were when this theater genre began in the fourteenth century. The stylized performances are learned from a very young age and transmitted generation to generation.

In India, Kathakali performances traditionally were coordinated collectively by the acting troupe. The artists combined acting, choreography, and music as an ensemble, rooted solidly in traditional practices. There are some directors today who lead modern Kathakali productions, but the norm continues to be a collective creation of the performance.

In general, directors did not receive much individual credit before the twentieth century. They were more integrated into the acting troupe and were responsible primarily for passing on the “correct” or established performance techniques.

George II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen (1826-1914) is considered by many Western scholars as the first modern director. George had a few things going for him. First, he was very wealthy and had time and money on his hands to make some big changes in how theatrical productions came together. Second, he was able to assemble a group of actors at his rural duchy to experiment with his new ideas. His focus was to incorporate more realistic acting styles and move away from the traditional presentational styles that were the norm. He did this by dropping the “star actor” and instead focusing on the ensemble as a whole and how they could work together to tell a story that appeared more like real life to audiences. This new natural style became known as the Meiningen style. The Duke also focused on historical accuracy in costumes, set, and lighting, which had not been much of a consideration earlier. His move toward realism influenced many future directors like Konstantin Stanislavski in Moscow and André Antoine in Paris.

At the same time as Meiningen, Stanislavski, and Antoine were pursuing realism, a counter movement of directors went for the exact opposite, building antirealism.

There’s always got to be a naysayer, am I right?

They developed original productions that exaggerated theatricality and style over historical accuracy. Identifying characteristics of antirealism include lyricism, symbolism, expressive and abstract uses of design, as well as intentionally contrived methods of acting.

Paul Fort launched Théâtre d’Art in 1890 in Paris to compete directly with Antoine. Vsevolod Meyerhold, who was once a disciple of Stanislavski, eventually went in a completely different direction. He challenged Stanislavski with his biomechanical constructivism. Biomechanics, as it was eventually called, was a movement-centered method characterized by bold gestures and rapid, almost acrobatic movement.

Check out this project in 2016 that explored Biomechanics in a 21^st century setting.

Today, critics say that we are in a time of “director’s theater.” The director is the leader and mastermind behind each production, and we can often identify the director by the style of the show we experience.

A recent example of director’s theater can be found in the film work of Wes Anderson. His films are almost immediately identifiable through his use of symmetry, color, distinct camera movements, flat compositions, and very precise set design and movement. He also writes all of his films in collaboration with others.

This YouTube video provides a number of interesting insights into Wes Anderson's creativity and collaborations: Every Wes Anderson Movie: Explained by Wes Anderson.

Directors today are free to mix realism and antirealism and build on historical  breakthroughs to invent their own ways to assemble a production. Today’s director is the visionary for the show. They coordinate not just the acting but also the technical aspects of a production. The director needs to inspire people with a huge variety of artistic backgrounds to come together to work on a united vision. And it wouldn't hurt if they also had a psychology degree! Artists today may affectionately call the director the official “herder of cats.” It’s not easy to bring together so many artists with different creative ideas to build a unified story.

As I swam around in these histories of directors last week, I hit the Google jackpot when I came across a contemporary director I plan to keep tabs on for the foreseeable future—Keenan Tyler Oliphant.

Keenan Tyler Oliphant is a theater-maker and director from Cape Town, South Africa. He brings a wealth of South African traditions into his new works and has enriched theater in the United States since his arrival in New York City to obtain an MFA in Directing at Columbia University in 2018.

What really made me perk up and pay attention was reading Oliphant’s personal statement about theater making on his web page. He says here that he treats theater making as ritual. His process is framed by the confrontation between South African storytelling rituals and Western theater traditions.

I keep running into these two words—ritual and storytelling. They are perpetually intertwined with theater.

Isn’t this where theater truly becomes electric—when we learn about and incorporate elements from traditions all over the world?

Keenan Tyler Oliphant seems like a true rebel and a visionary to me. Here is another quote from his website:

Western forms hold artistic mediums ideologically hostage; my work merges disciplines, art mediums and forms in an attempt to expand the global understanding of theatre and to dismantle and destabilize theatrical expectations. I belong to a lineage of South African communal theatre-making and storytelling. In these traditions the ancestors call the storyteller and healer to guide the education and spiritual life of their community. I think of my role as theatre-maker in the same way as that of the storyteller: simultaneously exchanging histories and futures to create spaces of healing, learning, mourning and celebration through performance. 

This quote sent me fully down the Keenan Tyler Oliphant rabbit hole. I learned that he is a founding member of Mixing Bowl Productions, which is an underground music theater company based in South Africa that promotes alternate and contemporary music theater works. It looks like the company is currently on hiatus, but I’ll keep them on my radar.

In addition to creating, directing, and performing in many new and bold works, Oliphant also brings his talents to mainstream Western theater. In 2021/2022 he received the prestigious Drama League Directing Fellowship, and he was recently the Associate Director of the Broadway production of Hadestown.

The more I learned about Oliphant, the more I thought of our students. His path was not an easy one, but he seemed to live by a quote he attributed to Miles Davis when he was interviewed on the Breaking Out Podcast: “The minute you have a backup plan, that backup plan will become your reality.”

Keenan Tyler Oliphant knew he was an artist. He never wanted to be anything else and couldn’t imagine anything else. So he didn’t have a backup plan. He stepped into who he really was, and doors eventually opened.

In the Breaking Out Podcast, Oliphant described the amazing route he took to Columbia University, finally being accepted as a master’s student and coming up with the whopping $96,000 tuition.

It’s worth the time to listen to the full Breaking Out Podcast with Jared Lesar Featuring Keenan Tyler Oliphant – Crowd Funding and Taking South African Stories to New York’s Theaters.

In this podcast, Oliphant inspires young artists with the story of his journey to Columbia University to study directing, using Crowdfunding to realize his dreams, bringing his cultural background to the arts to a global audience, and lessons he’s learned about the business of theater.

I’ll leave you with one more gem of a quote Oliphant gives us in the podcast:

I’m expecting to artistically fail. I’m expecting to personally fail. I’m expecting to network-ly and branding-ly fail. You know, in all areas of my life, I’m expecting to fail, and when those failures do come, I’m excited for what they will present, because to be human is to fail.

What an incredible way to look at any life pursuits.