Haitham Assem Tantawy

Haitham Assem Tantawy, born in Cairo, is a musical theater director, actor and choreographer. He received early musical training in piano and 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 theatre workshops in Poland and Italy, such as at 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 SINAI Orchestral Theatre as an independent company in Berlin, with which he realized publicly-funded transcultural musical theater productions on stage. For the Spieltriebe festival 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 served as choreographer for Rossini's "Il barbiere di Siviglia." From 2019 to 2022, he studied musical theater directing in the master's program at the University of Music in Karlsruhe with Prof. Andrea Raabe and Prof. Stephan Mösch. As part of a master class by Peter Konwitschny, he staged parts of Puccini's "La Bohème", and during his studies, a reduced version of Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin". In 2020, he was a scholarship holder of the Richard Wagner Scholarship Foundation and the Mozart Festival Würzburg. As a directorial degree, he successfully designed and staged his own Wagner musical theater piece "Wider das Verlöschen" - arranged for chamber ensemble and two singers. The project was sponsored by the Richard Wagner Association in Karlsruhe and the Wagner Society of Santiago de Chile and received excellent reviews. At the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, Tantawy has been acting director and assistant director since the 2022/23 season.