Haitham Assem Tantawy

Haitham Assem Tantawy, born in Cairo, is a musical theater director, actor and choreographer. He began his musical training on the piano and in music theory at the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music. In 2013, Tantawy received his Master of Arts in Performance Practices & Research from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama - University of London. He attended numerous acting and physical theater workshops in Poland and Italy, for example at Teatr Zar and The Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski & Thomas Richards. In 2015-2016, Tantawy was part of the ensemble of the internationally acclaimed and award-winning Song of the Goat Theatre in Poland as an actor, dancer and singer. In 2015, Tantawy founded the SINAI Orchestral Theatre as an independent company in Berlin, with which he realized the publicly funded transcultural music theater productions "Preludes" and "Yusuf's" on stage as director and composer. For the festival "Spieltriebe" at Theater Osnabrück, he directed the world premiere of the chamber opera "Das Ebenbild & Der alte Traum" by Kyungjin Lim & Tingting Pang, for which he also wrote the libretto. At the Nederlandse Reisopera he worked as a choreographer for Rossini's "Il barbiere di Siviglia".
From 2019 to 2022, he studied music theater directing at the Karlsruhe University of Music under Prof. Andrea Raabe and Prof. Stephan Mösch. As part of a master class with Peter Konwitschny, he staged parts of Puccini's "La bohème", as well as a reduced version of Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin" during his studies. In 2020, he was a scholarship holder of the Richard Wagner Scholarship Foundation and the Mozartfest Würzburg. He successfully designed and staged his own Wagner music theater piece "Wider das Verlöschen" - arranged for chamber ensemble and two singers. The project was supported by the Richard Wagner Association in Karlsruhe and the Wagner Society of Santiago de Chile and received excellent reviews. Tantawy has been working at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein as a stage manager and assistant director since the 2022/23 season and is making his directorial debut at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein with "Der Leuchtturm".