Dominika Knapik

I create multidisciplinary theatre that explores the body, the image, the text, and the tensions between them. My work addresses serious subjects through unexpected theatrical languages. I draw on the grotesque, comedy, exaggeration, pop culture, lip-sync, quotation, and performative play as ways of disrupting ossified languages of seriousness.

For me, humour is not an escape from reality but a means of disarming it. Exaggeration can expose violence. Cabaret can become a form of diagnosis. Laughter can function as a critical tool, opening up questions of labour, institutions, power relations, and the violence embedded in social systems, the psyche, and the body. Rather than explaining reality from a position of authority, I seek to create situations that generate uncertainty, reveal contradictions, and challenge established ways of seeing.

I often work with classical texts. Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Ibsen are not monuments to be preserved but living cultural structures: material to be rewritten, distorted, and confronted with contemporary forms of expression. Through these texts, I explore invisible pressures, social roles, and expectations surrounding the body, emotions, productivity, and obedience. I am drawn to theatre that entertains and unsettles at the same time.

For many years, I worked as a choreographer, co-creating more than eighty productions in Poland and Germany. This experience taught me that theatre emerges through encounters between people, the clash of perspectives, and a shared search for form and meaning. I am interested in directing that is conscious of the body – directing that understands movement as dramaturgy, image as argument, and rhythm as a structure of meaning.

Autobiographical experience is also an important element of my practice, though not as a private confession for its own sake. I am interested in the moment when personal experience becomes theatrical material and reveals broader social mechanisms. I treat intimacy as material that can be transformed and situated within wider social and political contexts.

I am interested in art that operates through subversion – art that sometimes appears lighter, funnier, or more absurd than it really is. Beneath layers of humour, aesthetic excess, and performative play lies an attempt to critically examine the mechanisms that organise our lives. My work is not concerned with explaining the world but with dismantling it from within.