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For me, theatre-making is not a job. It’s how I express who I am, what I feel about myself, what I feel about my environment, what I feel about the world.
- Ivo van Hove
 
 Theatre is an art and what is important is not that people have fun but that the final result is an art.
- María Irene Fornés
 
Creating theatre is a process, not of staging the dramatist’s text, but of using the motivation and opportunity for expression to be found in a text to establish a space where certain directors and certain seductive actors can exist and, at a certain moment in time, lure on an audience that has come, not to see a certain drama, but to experience what it is like to be in that particular space with these particular people. 
- Ian Carruthers, "The Theatre of Suzuki Tadashi"
 
It might be fiction, but it's not fake. The beating hearts in front of you are real. The gathering of people is real. The time we spend together, this time, is real. The story is real when it starts.
- Lauren Gunderson, "The Revolutionists"
 

I believe good theatre resists the urge to explain too much; the theatrical imagination can understand things that are implied through action, suggestion, image, gesture, simplicity. By leaving things out or letting physicality, style, and tone tell the story, we involve the audience as they stretch their imaginations.

– Hideki Noda 


If people want to see something they already understand, they shouldn't go to the theatre. They should go to the bathroom.
-Bertolt Brecht

By good luck, I was left-handed, as indeed, throughout my whole life, I had never done aught in the right-handed way. 
- Goethe
ABOUT MATT

I am left-handed.
 
(Because of this, in a world so thoroughly oriented to the ‘right,’ my point of view is always unavoidably skewed: I always seem to see things another way.)
 
I am a mad scientist, a ‘wrighter of play.’
 
I am a NYC-based director, performer, curator, and acting teacher (Stanislavski & Suzuki/Viewpoints).
 
I work like a craftsperson making visceral, couture ('hand-made') environmental theatrical events grounded in metaphor that are athletic, visually poetic, and resist easy categorization and consumption.
 
(Although my background is in theatre, I am in practice a visual artist whose medium is performance and whose primary material is the body.)
 
I believe the performance space is no less a laboratory than that of the chemist, who concocts and envisions in order to innovate. 

I am the Founding Artistic Director of Left Bank Performance Ensemble, a collective dedicated to crafting visually striking, visceral, and authentically alive performance events at the intersection of physical theatre, music-theatre, and visual art.

I am concerned about the arts in the US, both in terms of what we make (the ever-widening gap between work that is meaningful and work that is popular, and the continued exclusion of under-represented groups) and how we make it (that the work is grounded in a production line mentality at the expense of process). 

I think ‘because that’s the way we’ve always done it’ is the most dangerous sentence in the English language.

I believe we have the responsibility to craft on stage notions of how to live alongside one another with a greater degree of empathy.

I envision Left Bank as an antidote to the exclusive, unimaginative, and impotent theatre endemic to the US.

I serve as an Honored Curator for PhysFestNYC, a festival premiering in Manhattan in 2024 that celebrates, enriches, and envisions the field of physical theatre.

I recently co-devised and performed in The Lemnian Women at Hydrama Theatre in Hydra, Greece.
 
I am currently working with the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research on adapting Matthew Gasda’s novel Sonata for Piano and Violin.
 
I am working with La MaMa on presenting The Curse of the Wise, my adaptation of Macbeth, in their 2024-2025 season.

I have an MFA in Directing from Western Illinois University and a PhD in Theatre from the University of Missouri. 

I have additional training that includes the DirectorsLab Chicago and LaMaMa’s International Symposium for Directors in Spoleto, Italy, as well as intensives with SITI Company, Third Rail Projects, and the NY Neo-Futurists. 

I am a former Board President of Missouri’s Independent Actors Theatre.

I am a former Vice President and Secretary of the Association of Theatre Movement Educators.

I am a scholar of practice and have published research in the journal Stanislavski Studies and the edited collection Physical Dramaturgy.
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