In shoe/farm - a family business, ‘shoe shop’ and ‘farm’ merge into a fictional family business. Scenic scenes portray a real-life shoe farm, where shoes are grown, harvested, branded and sold. Potatoes are exchanged for Buffalo rolling over the counter. It will be Buren's first group performance for the black box: as a team and family of four, they perform specific tasks but are simultaneously interchangeable within the production line. The performance is between musical theatre, visual performance and choreography: with instruments and props that are part of the scenography, they shape music, sound and rhythm from work-related actions and band work.
As daughters of a shoe shop and a farm, Melissa and Oshin question how family ties and lineage influence ideas about labour, 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 jeans shoes, they shine a light on fetishistic relationships to the shoe and ponder what it would be like to be in other people's shoes: from low-wage worker in the shoe factory to the have-it-all fashionista. In a playful and layered way, they manoeuvre from pre-industrial to late capitalism.
