SLÁVA DAUBNEROVÁ
Theatre & Opera Director
Sláva Daubnerová is a theatre and opera director whose performance practice remains the DNA of her directing. It shapes a bold visual, physical and cinematic language in which music, image and contemporary perspectives meet.
SELECTED WORK
DAS RHEINGOLD
National Theatre Prague · 2026
LA TRAVIATA
Teatro dell’Opera di Roma · 2025
LA FORZA DEL DESTINO
Aalto-Musiktheater Essen · 2024
MELANCHOLIA
Royal Swedish Opera, Stockholm · 2023
SALOME
Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe · 2022
LOLITA
National Theatre Prague / Mariinsky Theatre, Saint Petersburg · 2019–2020
ABOUT
Sláva Daubnerová is a Slovak theatre and opera director whose work brings together contemporary visual language, strong dramaturgical thinking and a distinctly physical, cinematic approach to musical theatre. Her productions place canonical works in dialogue with contemporary questions of power, violence, vulnerability, identity and female experience, without treating the repertoire as a museum piece.
Her artistic language grew out of a pioneering career in performance. As an independent artist, author and performer, she introduced experimental, multimedia and documentary forms into the Slovak theatre landscape and developed a distinctive body of work centred on female identity and the lives of overlooked women artists. Her performances include Cells, inspired by the life and work of French-American sculptor Louise Bourgeois; M.H.L., a documentary portrait of Magda Husáková-Lokvencová, the first professional female theatre director in Slovakia; and Untitled, inspired by the work of American photographer Francesca Woodman. These works became important reference points in the development of performance art in Slovakia. This body of work was recognised with the Tatra banka Foundation Award for Art, the Crystal Wing Award and the Slovak Minister of Culture’s Prize. In 2020, Masterpiece, a solo performance examining the inner life of the artist and the position of women in art history, marked the culmination of her performance practice, bringing together the visual, physical and autobiographical approaches developed over more than a decade.
Building on this foundation, Daubnerová has developed an international directing practice spanning opera and drama. Her theatre productions include work at Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe and Landestheater Niederösterreich, while her opera work has taken her to the National Theatre Prague, Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm, Staatstheater Kassel, Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe, Aalto-Musiktheater Essen and Teatro dell’Opera di Roma.
Prague has played a central role in Daubnerová’s development as an opera director. She has directed across all four opera venues of the National Theatre Prague — the National Theatre, Estates Theatre, State Opera and New Stage — working across a wide repertoire including Shostakovich, Gounod, Janáček and Shchedrin. Her long-term collaboration with Prague culminated in Wagner’s Das Rheingold, which she directed in 2026 as the opening production of a planned Ring des Nibelungen cycle.
Her production of Shchedrin’s Lolita, created in Prague in 2019, was subsequently transferred to the Mariinsky Theatre, where it premiered under Valery Gergiev in 2020 and was nominated for the Golden Mask. At the Royal Swedish Opera, she directed the world premiere of Mikael Karlsson’s Melancholia, based on Lars von Trier’s film; the resulting audiovisual production received a Special Mention for Extraordinary Artistic Achievement at Golden Prague and was nominated for the Rose d’Or. In 2025, she made her Italian debut at Teatro dell’Opera di Roma with La traviata.
This foundation continues to shape the way she works with the body, constructs images, uses film and multimedia, and approaches classical repertoire from unexpected perspectives. Rather than illustrating the score, she creates theatrical worlds in which music, image, physicality and contemporary social questions become part of the same dramaturgical language.
Across her opera productions, Daubnerová is interested in what happens when familiar repertoire is viewed from an unexpected perspective — when psychological, social and gender dimensions become part of the musical drama itself. Her work moves between opera, theatre, performance, film and visual art, creating a directing language that is contemporary in form while remaining deeply engaged with the repertoire.
STUDIES
Jana Wild: Daubnerová’s Ninth
Andrej Samuel Čermák: Lonely Lamentations: Feminisms in Slovak Performance Through the Work of Sláva Daubnerová
Katarína K. Cvečková: Sláva Daubnerová and her Path to her Masterpiece
Soňa Šimková: The original route of Sláva Daubnerová or the magic of theatre Ingenious way
Dagmar Podmaková: Theatrical documentary of performance art