Tatiana Matveeva

Tatiana Matveeva (Tanya for short) was born in the Soviet Union on the last day that it exsisted; the next day, she lived in Russia. She grew up in the city of Ulyanovsk, the birthplace of Lenin.

When she was three, she began dancing with the children’s collective “Exiton,” and she continued on with them until she was seventeen. After high school, she moved to Moscow to study law (to her parents’ great joy). After Tanya hadn’t danced at all for two years, her best friend asked if she could fill in for an injured dancer in her hip-hop crew. From that moment onward, she couldn’t stop dancing. After a few years of hip-hop, contemporary dance piqued her interest. She began taking a wide variety of modern dance lessons and still managed to finish up her law degree.

In 2014, she traveled to the Netherlands to audition for the theatrical dance program at the Amsterdam University of the Arts. They told her that she was too old to follow the full program, but that she could be a guest student. Sofiko Nachkebiya, her Russian colleague, had at that time just begun dancing for Club Guy & Roni and told her about auditions for the Poetic Disasters Club. Tatiana had no idea what she should picture when she thought about the PDC – she thought that Groningen was a nice little village and that Roni was a man – but decided to give it a try anyway. (Did she lie in her CV about having a diploma in dance? Maybe.) After two years with the PDC, she danced in her first Club Guy & Roni production: Tetris mon Amour. She has been the leader of the PDC since 2018 which has earned her the nickname “Mother Russia.” She organizes, leads, coaches, choreographs, and dances; thankfully, she loves doing a hundred things at the same time.