Nine to Five Box

Jamal Suleiman (Choreographer & Director)

A dance about the invisible walls of routine.

In Nine to Five Box, choreographer Jamal Suleiman draws from personal experience to explore the unconscious grip of the daily grind. Performed by five dancers, this piece reflects our quiet desire to break free from routine, yet how we’re inevitably pulled back into it, often without realizing.

Inspired by the repetitiveness of life within fixed systems, the work questions how habit can dull the senses, limit imagination, and restrict our sense of self. It asks: What happens when comfort becomes a cage?

This is Suleiman’s first group choreography, and a bold experiment combining movement with live clay art on stage, an expression of bodies trapped, shaped, and reshaped by invisible forces.

The creative process began through a series of improvisation labs with dancers from diverse backgrounds. Suleiman invited them to move freely around themes of comfort zones, becoming boxed in, and eventually stuck. The resulting material was woven together into a physical narrative, co-developed with a clay artist and sound designer Yazan Abu Jarad, who built an original score from manipulated office sounds.