The Apparitions of the Dragonfly

The book, or rather, the book trilogy Fire, Butt and Snakes Are Not For Playing by Milena Miklavčič, a writer, journalist and aspiring collector and researcher of the ethnoanthropological topic – such as the sex life of Slovenians in the 20th century – earned its status of a cult book among Slovenian readers. Namely, the book exposes rather sensitive topics regarding sex and family life of older generation of Slovenians and provides an important insight: despite the fact that we are now living in a completely different world as it was fifty or a hundred years ago, the younger generations are still unconsciously manifesting the same intimate behavioural patterns of their forebears.

After Daniel Day Škufca had taken over his first stage direction at the Maribor Drama in the previous season, the premiere was interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic. About his decision, why he chose this particular book as an inspiration, he said: “My creativity is often influenced, even disturbed by wounds. Especially those I can feel myself. After the first hundred pages of the book, it was clear to me that I have found myself in a festering wound that I wanted to get into through the process. Yet, at the same time, it was quite obvious that tackling this particular wound was beyond my capacity and that it would be necessary to draw strength from everyone who would jump into it with me. ”

Mirjana Medojević, an award-winning director and playwright (a Montenegrin who found her creative space in Slovenia), said that her writing process, as conveyed in the text The Apparitions of the Dragonfly, was greatly influenced by Milena Miklavčič’s book, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, poems by Ljubomir Đurković and Tibor Hrs Pandur and finally by the rehearsed scenes of Maribor actors and actresses between January and June 2020. In the interview for the theatre programme, the author and playwright said: “When a play starts, it always turns out whether something makes sense or not, or if the play is impossible for staging, because only I could understand it… Moreover, all this could not even be a play, but sheer madness. Namely, for me, a play – either directing, or the text – is a link to intelligible meaning only if it can be grasped by others as well. The suggested narrative of the play was thus not invented by me – the play was already implicitly given in the word “dragonfly”[1] and in the title verse “Fire, butt and snakes are not for playing”.

[1] The Slovenian word for dragonfly, »kačji pastir«, contains word »snake« in the adjective form.