Konrad Dworakowski

 Director, actor, scenographer, songwriter. A graduate and lecturer of the Bialystok Department of Puppetry Art of the Theater Academy. Aleksander Zelwerowicz in Warsaw (currently Branch in Białystok). "Matter is given infinite fecundity, inexhaustible life force" - these words from Bruno Schulz's Treatise on Mannequins may, according to Dworakowski, serve as a puppet theater manifesto.He made his first works in 1999 at the Lalka Theater in Warsaw ("Ale Jaja" based on the text by Theodor Seuss Geisel) and the Banialuka Theater in Bielsko-Biała (group directing "Szopki don Cristobala" by Federico García Lorca). Then he directed performances in the most important Polish institutions from the circle of puppet theaters and directed to the young audience - including in Szczecin Puppet Theater "Pleciuga", Teatr im. Hans Christian Andersen in Lublin, Children's Theater of Zagłębie them. Jan Dorman in Będzin, the Guliwer Theater in Warsaw, the "Groteska" Theater in Kraków, the Arlekin Puppet Theater and the "Pinocchio" Puppet and Actor Theater in Łódź and the Puppet Theater in Wrocław. But his work is not limited to puppet shows. "I wouldn't like to be called only a puppet theater director, because that's not entirely true. I do theater of form, puppet theater, plastic theatre. I don't use puppets in every performance", he noted in a 2011 interview for "Gazeta Wyborcza". Dworakowski also created a number of theater productions whose repertoire is aimed at a wide (not necessarily younger) audience: at the Wrocław Pantomime Theater Henryk Tomaszewski, the Theater Institute and the Ochota Theater in Warsaw, the Chorea Theater and the National Stary Theater in Krakow. He reaches for texts created for younger audiences, such as Andersen's fairy tales or the Brothers Grimm, classics of children's novels, such as "Pinocchio", "King Matt the First", "The Wizard of Oz" or "Pippi Longstocking", but also for Bruno's texts Schulz, Olga Tokarczuk, Franz Kafka and Miguel de Cervantes. At the beginning of 2022, he directed the first Lithuanian translation of Stanisław Lem's Tales of Robots at the Dramatic Theater in Klaipeda. "The most important thing is not the plot, but the metaphor that Stanisław Lem wanted to convey. In our story, robotics is just a costume that is used to show a human", said Dworakowski. The Lithuanian staging of "Fables for Robots" was co-organized by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.