Sea of Silence

"Silence is the ocean of the unsaid, the unspeakable, the repressed, the erased, the unheard. It surrounds the scattered islands made up of those allowed to speak and of what can be said and who listens. Silence occurs in many ways for many reasons; each of us has his or her own sea of unspoken words." - Rebecca Solnit

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 crashes against the cliff to the rhythm of the tide, the clown repeatedly manipulates the audience, the acrobat balances on a tightrope, 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 the loss of autonomy and its reclamation.

Director Floor Houwink ten Cate and writer Esther Duysker transform what is normally seen as a private matter—domestic violence—into a public affair. For Sea of ​​Silence, Floor is once again collaborating with opera composer and singer Annelinde Bruijs. With Annelinde, she is steadily developing a new, socio-political operatic form in which they question classical notions of opera and transform them into grand, vulnerable gestures.

Floor Houwink ten Cate (born 1987) creates urgent performances at the intersection of theater, opera, and film, based on personal questions of conscience. In her visual and physical portraits, she celebrates the discomfort and pain of life by reducing major moral dilemmas to a human scale and by exaggerating underexposed problems to operatic proportions.

Please note: this performance features physical and psychological domestic violence.