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Coming to this project straight off the back of our one-act plays, we are engaging with the difference between the playscript and the fairytale text. The focus is shifting from characterisation and the spoken word in the social frame, to the nature of storytelling as a transaction between teller and witness. We are engaging with symbol, image, discovery, revelation, repetition, and how we shape this through time. The language of the telling - its images, symbols, motifs - has more importance than the so-called truth of the action. The flights of fancy are much greater in mythic tales, but the images chosen must sing with a connection to the collective consciousness of the community it speaks to.

We decided to begin work with the performers by working with them on layers of textures, provocations, images or motifs, before exposing them to the specific story we are looking to tell. We as storytellers wanted to see the actors take time with images in isolation, giving the pigeon or the bath of milk or the wooden shoes their full attention. We developed their sensitivity to the images of the piece, and so the first reading of the text focussed on the potency of each moment. When they read that the pigeon bathed in milk, it conjured up physical sensations and memories in the performers. It is this sensation that we want to bring to the audience - for the symbols to tap into the dream world and unlock imagination beyond the literal or the real.