Once we decided that the fairy tale we would take inspiration from was Cinderella by Charles Perrault we had to decide how we would adapt it. Hope came up with the idea of opening the show with shadow puppets and explaining the beginning of Cinderella, how her father got remarried and Cinderella’s step-mother and step-sisters were horrible to her. This then goes onto Cinderella wishing she could seek revenge on her siblings. The actors on stage would represent Cinderella’s mind. Following this, when the Fairy God Mother shows up at the end, rather than Cinderella getting gifts to go to the ball, she would instead get gifts which will help her see that it is not her sister’s fault that they are mean and Cinderella should not try to seek revenge because it does not benefit her.

Since we had a basic structure we then needed to fill in the blanks. We had the idea of the performance being surrealist because it was a dream world. We started out with having the idea that Cinderella was getting ready for a ball and was then in control of her sisters. Her sisters could not move or do anything without her help or guidance. One example is, Cinderella had to push the sisters onto stage and when she wanted the sisters to talk she clapped. However, when we showed this during one of our lessons there was still not a clear genre. Although we wanted the performance to be surrealist, we did not think it was possible for us. Therefore we decided it would be more appropriate to have surreal elements.

After this discussion we chose to have different genres throughout the performance. We chose; film noir, western, horror and telenovela/melodrama. This can be seen as being slightly surreal because the genres are random and there is no need for them to change. However, because the performance was a dream, having different genres worked in our favour. Deciding on the genres also enabled us to think of a solid storyline for the performance. Once we had decided to use a variety of genres our performance began to take shape.