Esther Duysker & Floor Houwink ten Cate - Sea of Silence
Esther Duysker (1985) is a screenwriter, playwright and radio play writer. In 2011, she graduated from HKU University of the Arts in Utrecht, for Writing for Performance. She translated The Raisin Cycle for Well Made Productions. She also wrote for Orkater, Frascati Productions, Het Nationale Theater, Firma Mes, and Rudolphi Productions, among others. Sea of Silence was written at Frascati Productions in this way. In addition to the theatre, Duysker is no stranger to the world of film and she has worked on a number of children's books. Duysker co-screened the film Buladó, which received a Golden Calf for best film in 2020.
Director and writer Floor Houwink ten Cate (1987) creates performances at the intersection of musical theatre, opera and film. She studied at the Dutch Film Academy and then graduated cum laude from Utrecht University with a master's degree in Theatre Studies. As a director and writer, she made her debut in 2019 with Nineties Productions and Orkater with the electro-opera Merkel, and after this she made The Standard Life of a Standard Woman, One Man Show and Sea of Silence under the wings of Frascati Productions. In 2022, in collaboration with Katie Mitchell, she made the climate-neutral opera A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction and her first large-venue performance Atropa, co-directed with Naomi Velissariou. Since 2022-2023, Floor has been a permanent artistic core member of Theater Utrecht. In 2023, she was selected for the Women Opera Makers masterclass of the prestigious Académie of the festival d'Aix-en-Provence.
ABOUT SEA OF SILENCE
Somewhere in a remote town, high on a cliff by the sea, lives a family. Their life is unspectacular, until they close the curtains and the circus of violence begins. As the sea pounds against the cliff to the rhythm of the tide, the clown manipulates the audience again and again, the acrobat balances on the taut rope and the monster roars as he emerges from his cage. But the sea level rises and the wave of oppression and powerlessness slowly but surely reaches the family's lips. Sea of Silence is a painful love story about losing autonomy and reclaiming it.
