Singer and songwriter Sia recently released a stunning music video for her song “The Greatest,” featuring Kendrick Lamar, that appears to be a tribute to the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla. in June.
In the video, dancer Maddie Ziegler leads a group of 49 dancers in an energetic dance routine, 49 also being the number of people killed in the shooting at the gay nightclub.
In many scenes, the dancers lie still on the floors of hallways and behind prison bars, as though dead. In the final scene, Ziegler stares at the camera and cries, her cheeks streaked with the colors of the pride flag.
“It’s a punch to the heart to consistently see the 49 child stand-ins for the Pulse victims alternately reveling in dance throughout the video and, at times, seemingly running for their lives,” writes The Daily Beast,
"At the end of the clip, the children all collapse en masse, evoking the carnage inside the nightclub following the shooting and an even more layered, painful image: the reminder that the deceased were all someone’s children, that there was an innocence in each of them—a right to be loved—that was taken away by someone’s violent hatred."
On June 12, an armed Omar Mateen entered Pulse nightclub, killing 49 people and wounding 53 others in one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history. The shooting reawakened a national debate on U.S. gun rights reform and ongoing discrimination against LGBTQ people.
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