The Fairy Tales of Our Childhood

In The Fairy Tales of Our Childhood, the creative team directed by Jernej Lorenci questions the role of fairy tales in individual lives, the archetypal meaning of fairy tales from their own childhood and also the role of fairy tales in the collective unconscious. Together with the actors, the director Jernej Lorenci wants to get to the roots of their childhoods and “relive” the states and emotions they experienced during story telling. Or, in director’s own words: “We will return to our childhood. The fairy tales we heard as children will help us recreate the time in which we felt completely safe, completely whole, merged with the other, the narrator, and ourselves. We will try to carefully reconstruct particular narratives, particular evenings, persons-narrators, spaces, light, scents, voices, feelings. We ourselves, parents or not, are story-tellers. We will try to reconstruct our evenings, too. Some of the narrators from our childhoods might already be deceased. What once upon a time and ever after are to fairy tales, birth and death are to life. ‘Life is pregnant with death,’ says Emile Cioran. We will try to intertwine fairy tales’ circular time with the linear time of life and bring the dead back to life. Because a fairy tale is an exit from time, it is above time and for all times. And all years. Therefore: a praise of fairly tale, a praise of imagination, acceptance of death.”

The production directed by the superb director Jernej Lorenci – who referred to two famous authors when preparing this project, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard and the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, who studied fairy tales and their influence on the individual’s unconscious and the society as a whole – was created as a co-production between the Prešeren Theatre Kranj and the SNT Nova Gorica.

We will return to our childhood. The fairy tales we heard as children will help us recreate the time in which we felt completely safe, completely whole, merged with the other, the narrator, and ourselves.

Jernej Lorenci