Rudi Šeligo
The Witch from Zgornja Davča
The poetic and absurd play by Rudi Šeligo The Witch from Zgornja Davča (1978) is in a way a follow-up of the play Fair Vida. The play is set in a home of a "civilised” middle-class family into which Darinka, the daughter of the Slovenian mythological queen Vida, had married. As Vilma Štritof writes in "The Woodpecker has overgrown it”, Darinka, "the creature of pagan roots, original joy for life, and a full-blooded and nice young girl”, found herself caught in a triangle of "a cold, demanding and ruthless mother, an utterly competitive father and a powerless, alcoholic son”.
In his work The Witch from Zgornja Davča Šeligo confronts two completely different and incompatible worlds – life on Earth marked by Slovenian mental numbness, thoughtless consumerism and insensitive social conformity, and the afterlife characterised by the fairy- and magician-like "structural elements of the subcosciousness”, sexual power, ardent subjectivity and intimate connections with nature par excellence. Dramaturge Vesna Đikanović writes that "Niko (and in a somewhat different way also The Father) is a prime disabled specimen, whose identity has been permanently erased by The Mother who, like Apollo in the ancient times, has taken the right to draw lines from her standpoint, thus bounding the territory. She lives quite comfortably in the Apollonian formalism, which steals from nature in order to create a world of objects. That is why her battle with Darinka is this play's central battle. Darinka brings along the Dionysian endowment and the chthonic energy, suppressed and long gone by the civilisation /.../ Darinka feels the forgotten proximity of the gods and the vast possibilities and power of nature, as well as the time of the "eternal return”... Different aspects of the circular structure represent the main construction challenge of putting on stage the fragmentary world of Šeligo's Family.
The play was directed by the Croatian theatre director Damir Zlatar Frey, who has lived through the re-educational methods that any peculiar and "magician-like" soul must survive in order to live in the world of demands imposed on us by the present-day society and family.
Photo gallery
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
