Tatiana Matveeva
Dancer
Tatiana Matveeva (Tanya in short) was born in the Soviet Union on the last day it existed; since the next day she has lived in Russia. She grew up in Ulyanovsk, Lenin’s hometown.
When she was three she started dancing with the children’s collective “Exiton”, where she stayed until she was seventeen. After high school, she moved to Moscow to study law to the delight of her parents. After two years of not dancing at all, her best friend asked her to replace an injured dancer in her hip-hop crew. From that moment on she never stopped dancing. After a few years of hip-hop, her attention was drawn to contemporary dance. She started taking various classes in modern dance while completing her law studies.
In 2014 she traveled to the Netherlands to audition for theatre dance training at the Amsterdam School of the Arts. She was told she was too old to follow the full program, but she was allowed to be a guest for a year. At the time Sofiko Nachkebiya, a Russian fellow dancer, had just started at Club Guy & Roni and told her about auditions for the Poetic Disasters Club. Tatiana had no idea what to expect – in her mind Groningen was a nice little village and Roni a man – but decided to try anyway. (Did she lie in her resume about having a dance diploma? Maybe.) After two years at the PDC she danced for the first time in a production of Club Guy and Roni: Tetris mon Amour. As of 2018 she is the captain of the Poetic Disasters Club and gained the nickname of “Mother Russia”. She organizes, directs, coaches, choreographs and dances; luckily she likes to do a hundred things at the same time.