The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2023 Summer Performance Grant to Keenan Tyler Oliphant for his upcoming Production, A PRACTICAL BREVIARY: TERCE, a new music-theatre work by Obie Award-winning composer/performer Heather Christian directed by Keenan Tyler Oliphant.

Keenan is a Theatre-maker and Director. As a Theatre-maker Keenan recalls his traditional Southern African storytelling lineage by simultaneously exchanging with histories and futures to create spaces of healing, investigation, mourning and celebration through performance. Keenan has worked in various Broadway, off-Broadway, and downtown spaces in New York as well as creating work in South Africa. He directed the US premiere of Will You Come With Me? (PlayCo May 2022), the Associate Director of Hadestown (Broadway), Oratorio for Living Things (Ars Nova). Further Directing projects include Jeesun Choi’s To the Ends of the Earth (JACK), Jay Stull’s The Singularity Play (Havard TDM; Alliance Theatre Reading) Sam Grabiner’s People on Earth (Columbia University), Vivian Barnes’ Intro To (Ensemble Stage Theatre), Live from Mount Olympus Podcast (The Team), Kyk Hoe Skyn Die Son [Look at How the Sun Shines] (Clubbed Thumb Winterworks) and Self-Combustion of a 30 Something Year Old... (New Ohio Producers Club). Keenan is an alumnus of the Clubbed Thumb Directing Fellow (2020-2021), the Drama League Directing Fellowship (2021-2022) and Columbia University MFA in Directing for Theatre program.

A PRACTICAL BREVIARY: TERCE is inspired by breviary masses performed by cloistered monks, TERCE employs modern language and rich, contemporary musical arrangements to reimagine the concept of the Holy Spirit and a lifeforce through the perspective of women. Featuring 36 performers and musicians, TERCE reinvents the traditional breviary cycle, bridging the gap between the ancient and the contemporary. Drawing inspiration from the Hebrew and Aramaic words for the Holy Spirit, both of which are feminine in conjugation, this concept is explored through the perspective of the feminine. The libretto weaves together classic monastic texts, Christian's own adaptations, and passages from REVELATIONS OF DIVINE LOVE, a medieval text written by Julian of Norwich, one of the first female theologians and mystics.

This project was commissioned and is also being developed through HERE&Back. TERCE will have its world premiere in a HERE production as part of PROTOTYPE: OPERA | THEATRE | NOW at The Space at Irondale in Brooklyn in early 2024.

Please visit Keenan’s Instagram, Website and Facebook for more information.