Matthew Romantini

Matthew is an award-winning theatre and dance practitioner, with over 25 years’ national and international experience as a performer, creator, director and choreographer (for theatre, dance, and with orchestral musicians), and with 10 years’ experience teaching at the post-secondary level (York University 2010-2014, and Randolph College for the Performing Arts, Toronto 2021-present). His career has seen a strong emphasis on movement and voice: in addition to his undergraduate degree in acting, he trained under Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi of Kokoro Dance (Vancouver) in contemporary dance and butoh, is a graduate of Canada’s National Voice Intensive, led by David Smukler and an extensive faculty of voice and movement professionals from across the continent, has two decades of experience with Linda Putnam’s River Work, which is based in Grotowski technique, as well as being a certified Batdorf Technique instructor.  Batdorf is a somatic technique that helps performers develop deep physiological awareness in order to create authentic, repeatable and sustainable embodied emotional states.

Matthew is most interested in work that acknowledges the audience’s presence in the space with the performer(s). This has less to do with “audience participation” as we think of it, and is more about the fact that any fourth wall is in fact a permeable membrane, so audiences and performers will necessarily co-influence one another, leading to magical and unforeseen transformation in both.  

He seeks out artistic opportunities that focus on finding meaning amidst the paradoxes of human experience: connection and outsider status; optimism and deep understanding of apparently insurmountable challenge; beauty and grotesquerie; deeply personal artistic expression and the importance of the audience experience; artistic rigour and sustainable mental and physical health of artists. His work is embodied, visual, humanistic, specific and elegant. By turns kinetic and contemplative, Matthew’s directing style marries the comedic and the tragic, the metaphorical and the concrete.  

Matthew has recently had the privilege to participate in a number of artistic projects which have re-confirmed his interest in making large-scale works.  First, as a professor at a musical theatre college, he has been asked to direct several plays with casts ranging from 15-20 performers, giving him a chance to hone his skill in directing larger casts, and balancing the production requirements of individual performers’ nuances, with larger stage picture and flow of movement in groups.  This adds to the learning he had in his acting role in Don Pasquale at the COC, where he keenly observed Renaud Doucet’s approach to the soloists, the chorus and supernumeraries, and his interactions with conductor Jacques Lacombe.  And this all goes alongside his experience directing and producing works for independent theatre.  Notable projects include the Dora-Nominated Gorey Story which he co-wrote and co-produced for The Thistle Project, Ten Nights of Dream directed for TomoeArts (Vancouver), several concert seasons for the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, and acting as a translator and script supervisor for Expandido Theatre Group’s The Rage of Narcissus, and Kill Your Father (whose translation will have an upcoming publication).  For Randolph College, Matthew has directed Unity (1918), The Government Inspector, Peer Gynt, and Arcadia, and currently has multiple creation/direction projects in various stages of development, as well as a book in early planning stages.