One of the joys (or horrors) of dreams is that the world that you visit in your sleep is entirely of your own creation. Even if the place is somewhere you have been before and the people are the people you see every day, they have been selected by your brain to feature in its own display of creativity. And whether you’re aware of it or not, your unconscious mind is entirely in control of what happens.
Our ideas have changed a fair bit by now. We started with the idea of Cinderella’s bed being her safe space in a forest that represented her mind. As her mind became more twisted and her thoughts more sinister, what started out as pretty forest would become littered with rubbish and become dark, broken with a creepy atmosphere.
This was still the case with our current ideas- her world becoming more and more sinister, but we wanted to change how the progression was shown in a way that was more true to the surrealist aesthetic and dark comedy we wanted to keep.

This was the idea that drove our newest scene.
Taking into consideration what we had previously devised (the long table) we thought the table could be made of several different blocks that were independent of each other. We decided that these blocks could be used as different stations. These were:

1- Cleaning (products)
2- actual bed
3- sewing
4- dinner table
And each station would represent different parts of the Cinderella story.
Cleaning would be Cinderella doing her chores and cleaning
Bed would be to show her standard of life and her ‘safe space’ in the real world and her mind
Sewing would be where her sisters would do her bidding
Dinner table would the end scene where her mind and her twisted thoughts came to climax

In Cinderella’s dream, just as with anyone else’s dream, her mind was what controlled the action. Therefore, we decided to have Cinderella in control of the events and her two sisters, who were in the world, but not a part of it. To show the difference between the control levels of the sister’s and Cinderella, we had Cinderella learning how to control her world. When she clicked, the sisters, powerless, did her bidding and when they rebelled, she punished them with a click of her fingers. For Gertrude, she began mooing instead of speaking and Belinda lost her sight, but only realised when it was pointed out to her. We still wanted to keep the surrealist aesthetic and a dark comedy about the piece and so we decided that Cinderella would start the scene cleaning the house, but for a party of her, rather than as a chore. She would be doing this with a mop with a doll’s head as the mop top. We rehearsed this a few times, adding more comedic elements that showed Cinderella’s more twisted side.

We showed this scene in our second work in progress meeting. The overall response was positive and our change of style was well received. Our storyline was liked and the comedy was both funny and effective in showing Cinderella’s character.
The advice given to us was to build on this idea of the mix of styles and rather than the piece getting more and more surrealist as the play went on, to have each scene a different style. If we were brave enough, the suggestion was that we could have each scene scripted and the lines and basic blocking learnt, but for the audience or a wheel of chance to decide the style for each scene seconds before we did it. We were excited by this idea and each had a list of different styles that we wanted to experiment with, however, we decided to have the style for each scene to be present in order for light and sound effects to be designed and to avoid the risk of the performers being flustered by large changes.