Matthew Diafos
Matthew Diafos Sweeney / Ματθἀιος Διἀφως creates original music and performance work, through his company four larks . He “hurtles over the boundaries between genres to create immersive, transformative events” (NPR) and his work has been described as “the future of contemporary performance” by the Los Angeles Times.
Mat was recently a Fulbright Scholar in Greece, working with the National Opera, teaching at the University of the Peloponnese, and exploring the polyphonic folk music of the region. He is currently back home in Los Angeles, creating new work in residence at Center Theatre Group, and as a guest scholar at UCLA through the Center for the Art of Performance. He is also a recent fellow at MacDowell, at Yaddo, and at Bogliasco , an artist in residence at Watermill, and a recipient of the Dorothy and Richard E Sherwood Award recognizing an “innovative, adventurous theatre artist in Los Angeles…pushing boundaries and improving the future of their artistic field.”
Mat writes and composes for ensembles of cross-disciplinary performers that generate shifting visual, physical, and musical landscapes with bodies, voices, and instruments. He has created and presented original work in theaters, concert halls, galleries, museums, and a variety of disused industrial spaces and other unexpected locations. His junkyard operas are composed from collaged texts and found/repurposed objects. In sound, image, and movement, he reimagines mythic narratives for our age of limitless information, dehumanizing technologies, and ecological anxiety. By revisiting past mythologies, Mat's work "holds up a mirror for us to see the present in, leaving us to contemplate not only the state of our own souls, but matters of justice and moral responsibility" (Jacki Apple's Performance / Media / Art / Culture).
He first gained attention as LA's "most soulful interpreter of theological ideas" (Stage Raw) with The Temptation of St Antony, described as a “sensual, intellectual and vastly entertaining feast” (LA WEEKLY) that held audiences “in ecstatic thrall from start to finish” (Huffington Post). His ritual Katabasis (descent) through the underworld at the Getty Villa led audiences around the grounds and gardens of the museum in the style of the Eleusinian mysteries, and was heralded as a "brilliant postmodern opera" (FABRIK) that set "a high water mark for site-specific performance" (NoProscenium).
His proscenium stage work includes Frankenstein, which swept the Ovation Awards across all categories, including awards for his Direction and for Best Play. His "breathtaking and terrifying" (NPR) theatrical adaptation of Mary Shelley's novel was called "a jaw-dropping combination of performance, stagecraft and technology." (Los Angeles Blade).
Mat’s creative research centers around ancient ritual and performance cultures and their contemporary analogues. He frequently shares his research and practice with students, most recently as a guest lecturer in the Classics Department at UCLA, at CalArts, and at the Athen's Conservatoire. In 2024 he presented at the Society for Classical Studies in Chicago and the Performing Space conference on site-specific work in Nafplio, Greece.
Mat recently created new work for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and the Kansas City Symphony Orchestra. He was an initiating Creative Director for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra's series of site-specific and trans-disciplinary new music programming, and a curator at Basic Flowers, a creative laboratory and community hub hidden in a repurposed flower shop in downtown LA. He lives and works in downtown Los Angeles, on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Gabrielino-Tongva and Chumash people.
RECENT INTERVIEWS & LONG FORM CRITICISM: Washington Blade / Broadway World / Theatre Magazine / LA Stage Alliance / Arts Beat / Fabrik / Jacki Apple's Performance - Media - Art - Culture / RealTime / Alta Magazine / LA Times / Primitive Surveys / Arena Magazine
