This Cinderella is not going to stay quiet; she is not going to conform to the stereotyped perceptions the world wants to impose. This Cinderella has dreams, and she won't hide them. She will challenge you, she will make you think, but most of all, she will stand up for what she believes in...
Performer Aisling Kiely brings Cinderella Lives! - her sexily-skewed solo retelling of the Cinderella story - to The Edinburgh Festival Fringe from today, 3rd - 24th August. Cinderella Lives! is the perfect companion piece to the growing resurgence of feminisim amongst young women, thanks to the increase in awareness provoked by politically active movements such as UK Feminista, the 'No More page 3' Campaign and Pussyriot. This movement harnesses creative approaches to demonstrate that the fight for equality amongst people, regardless of gender, is not yet won.
Cinderella Lives! is representative of this new feminist activism, aiming to be at once relevant, insightful, tongue-in-cheek and entertaining. The show is unashamedly sexy, whilst cleverly lampooning ideas of what is sexy and why. Cinderella Lives! reclaims the paradigm, articulating the issues women never talk about and exploring how that silence is holding them back.
Eve is a young woman who thinks she has everything figured out. To her the feminist movements of the last hundred years are, at best, interesting... but largely irrelevant in a society where she is by law permitted to own her own property, vote and apply for any job. Really there is only a pair of boobs between her and the next guy, right?
But, on the day we meet Eve, she catches sight of herself and realises that her whole upbringing has been a battleground of contradictions. Why feed her, as a girl child, endless variations of stories involving a handsome prince coming to save her, while also ostensibly training her to be an independent, liberated human being? Like Cinderella, Eve has been quietly playing the good girl -building a career, while putting her earnings and time into making herself presentable for a man who would never come. Certainly not a man who might actually fill this hole inside her...
Cinderella Lives! throws both Eve and the props that give the impression of her liberation - the tampon, the pill and even domestic appliances like the hoover - into the air and wonders whether it was the forces of idealism and enlightenment, or commerce and economics, that created this paradoxical creature. Can Eve find a new ending to the 'Cinderella' story that truly sets her and her expectations free?
Performer Aisling Kiely single-handedly conjures up the external powers bearing down on Eve through dance, sketches and upended burlesque, with a host of helpers in the form of an androgynous Fairy Godmother, Eve's unquestioning alter-ego Alice and a Henry Hoover.
The show will run at Venue 13, 20:15 (55mins). Previews: 3rd August. Show Dates: 4th - 24th (no show 12th). Ticket Price: £8 (£6). Box Office: 0707 420 1313 or online at
http://www.venue13.com.
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