The surrealist party was established by Breton in the 1920s stemming from the Dada movement. Dada was essentially ‘anti-art’ and saw that rather than an expression of creativity, art was a tool by which right wing politics and war were encouraged and so created their own avant-garde movement that challenged the bourgeois, political nature of art. The surrealist movement, developed in the 1920s by Breton, stemmed from Dada and its notions that dramatic text was not a means by which to express meaning. Surrealism, although an art movement, was also a means by which its supporters and theatre could explore the human subconscious. Surrealism explored the human conscious through its notion that the nonsense of dreams and the logic of reality were not that different, as both were influenced by the human subconscious. Using techniques that allowed the subconscious to express itself such, such as encouraging madness and spontaneity, the human subconscious was explored through methods such as dream analysis. Dreams, with their lack of logical narrative and apparent nonsensical images, can arguably be seen as a reflection of the human subconscious.
A reflection of the human subconscious, we chose dreams as a means to explore Cinderella’s mind through the apparently illogical succession of images concluding in a logical explanation to Cinderella’s behaviour.
Although we had chosen the apparent randomness of surrealism as the style of our piece, it had to be clear which parts of it were happening in her head and which parts were happening for real. Because of this, and the fact the focus of the piece was Cinderella’s thoughts, we decided to have her dream like mind as surrealist and reality as a different style.
When deciding the style for reality, there were several factors we had to take into account. These were:
The importance of keeping reality and her mind separate to avoid a blurring of the two states
The focus of the piece was her internal thoughts, not her physical actions, so the reality should be simple but efficient.
The fact Cinderella was well known gave an obvious advantage as it meant that the story didn’t have to be explained for people to understand and follow it, giving the piece a secure basis from which to work with. However, this also mean that to perform a version of Cinderella meant that there were expectations we were expected to adhere to, including discourse markers, as well as other, popular versions that people had become used to and the expectations they could have left.
The narrative of the story of Cinderella was logical and structured, unlike her mind, and so the style needed to be structured and overall contrasting to the surrealist style of her mind.
These factors, although at first constraining, gave us, ironically, a structure which we needed to conform to in order for the differences between the two states to be absolute and appropriate. This gave us the idea for reality to be presented as it originally was- a fairy tale that was read out. As reality was not the focus, it was written in a summed up, reflective way that established the characters and their personalities and the main events that led up to the break down that sparked Cinderella’s imagination. To accompany the voice over, we decided to have shadow puppets as their simplicity and intimacy contrasted with the vibrancy and larger-than-life characters of Cinderella’s mind.

Screenshot of a recording of our first puppet scene