How to Open a Cupboard

How to Open a Cupboard is a dance and theater performance focusing on social commentary on the modern world. The primary props used throughout the performance are two red cupboards which have holes cut out for the performers to fit into them like wooden suits. The cupboards and the show as a whole seem to be a metaphor for the boxes we are put into, and those we build around ourselves. Through obligations, work, personal relationships, and the expectations we place on ourselves and those others place on us, we are always being boxed in or limited by the societal structures and people around us. They weigh us down, constrain our creativity, and stress us out by pulling us in several directions at once. 

In this respect, How to Open a Cupboard was dead on in showing how these various things affect an individual both physically and mentally. The performance was a kind of controlled chaos with extreme, sometimes absurd repetition, and one of the performers perpetually being bogged down or boxed in by the others on stage. While it starts out a little unusually at first with the actors wearing the cupboards, as it goes on, the commentary becomes clear. A comic sense of confusion and chaos in the modern individual’s everyday life persists, while the feelings of being overwhelmed and pulled every which way by various obligations resonates with the busy twenty-first-century lifestyle. 

-- Jessica Lave