Let's get some...SHOES.

Well, I thought it was funny.

Anyway, so I posted this whole revelation on the Facebook page as well, but I am really quite excited to flesh it out here. Thanks to the lovely brainstorming party Shivangi, Eloisia and I had (under the watchful eye of Mrs. Boske), We came up with this idea of shoes for the play.

But first, a little background. There is a museum in Washington, D.C. that remembers the victims of the Holocaust during WWII. I haven't been able to visit it myself, but many people I know have, and they all say that what moved them the most was "the shoes". What they refer to is a huge pile of shoes (seen above), enough to form almost two walls of solid footwear in a long hallway. This really drives home how MANY people died in the Holocaust, with those shoes only representing a small number. I really liked the idea, but one of the messages we are trying to convey is how these people AREN'T just numbers. So how would we use this newly thought up- motif?

First, we would use a simple line of shoes. A line dividing the audience from the stage, their world from the ones of Rebekah and Aysha. Instead of the uniform shoes that were issued at the concentration camps used in the museum exhibit, we would utilize shoes of all different styles and varieties: big, small, colorful, dull, worn, shiny, male, female. It wouldn't be hard between the nine of us to acquire a multitude of totally different shoes. This diversity in footwear would symbolize how every single pair is different, and so is every single person who used to wear them.

As the play progresses, and people die, their shoes would be added to the line, in order to tell the audience that the casualties are still growing. Erin really liked the concept of "walking in someone else's shoes" from her Christmas assembly video, so we had the idea to have one of the "mirror" pairings put the shoes on the line, instead of the person who actually dies. For instance, Ahmed would put the little boy martyr's shoes on the line, Jory with Ahmed's and then Rebekah and Aysha would do each other's at the end.

This is a motif I really like, and hope the rest of the crew does too.

Peace and Love, Benji ;)