buren - shoe/farm: a family business

"What we used to eat, we now put on your feet!"

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‘Shoe shop’ and ‘farm’ merge in a fictional family business. Picturesque scenes portray a real shoe farm, where shoes are grown, harvested, branded, and sold. Potatoes are exchanged for buffalo's that roll over the counter. In buren’s first group performance for the black box, they perform specific tasks as a team and family of four, although each member is simultaneously interchangeable within the production line. 

The performance is situated between music theatre, visual performance, and choreography: with instruments and props that are part of the scenography, they shape music, sound, and rhythm out of work-related actions and assembly-line work. 

As people raised in a shoe shop and a farm, Oshin and Melissa ask themselves questions about how family ties and origins influence ideas about work, class, and money. What does it mean to be an heir in addition to being a ‘child of’? Homegrown and self-made? From a collection of clogs, glass boots, and denim shoes, they shine a light on fetishistic relationships to the shoe and contemplate what it would be like to stand in someone else's shoes. From the low-wage worker in the shoe factory to the have-it-all fashionista. In a playful and layered way, they manoeuvre from a pre-industrial era to late capitalism.