Floor Houwink ten Cate
Maker
In her visual and physical portraits, director and writer Floor Houwink ten Cate celebrates the discomfort and pain of life by reducing major moral dilemmas to human proportions and by blowing underexposed problems to operatic proportions.
Sea of Silence (Frascati Producties) was released in season 2022: a cinematic and kaleidoscopic performance about mental and physical violence in (intimate) relationships. battlefield of dreams (Frascati Producties coproduction with Theater Utrecht) will be her last production at Frascati.
In september 2023, Sea of Silence was resumend and toured thoughout the Netherlands.
Biography
Director and writer Floor Houwink ten Cate (1987) creates urgent performances on the intersection of music theatre, opera, and film based on personal questions of conscience. After earning a bachelor's degree from the Netherlands Film Academy, Floor graduated cum laude from Utrecht University in 2013 with a Master's degree in Theatre Studies. She became a Newcomer at Orkater and, between 2015 and 2020, was co-artistic director of the Nineties Productions collective, with whom she made the performances Untitled, 2017 (BNG Bank Theaterprijs), Noir (2017), and Billy the Kid (2018), among others. She was assistant director for Boogaerdt/VanderSchoot on several occasions, did the final direction for Permanent Destruction: The HM Concert and Pain Against Fear (Naomi Velissariou & Theater Utrecht, 2019 and 2020), and directed the electro-opera Merkel (Nineties Productions & Orkater, 2019).
In 2020, Floor created her first performance at Frascati Producties. The everyday life of an everyday woman (originally: Het standaard leven van een standaard vrouw) is a cinematic death scene with a larger-than-life soundtrack of a woman seeing her life pass before her one last time. How do you take stock of a life lived entirely on the sidelines of history? In One Man Show (Frascati Producties, 2021), her second production at Frascati Producties, she takes a closer look at the role of the male. What do we regard masculinity in 2021? One Man Show is a feminist stand-up (or step-down) solo by Benjamin Moen and Floor about the emancipation and transformation of the contemporary male.
April 2022 saw the premiere of Floor's third Frascati production. Sea of Silence is a cinematic family epic about a cycle of mental and physical violence and about losing and reclaiming autonomy. Together with writer Esther Duysker, Floor turns what is typically regarded as a private matter - domestic violence - into a public issue. In June 2022, Floor's climate-neutral performance, A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction, was staged at Frascati. It was produced by the Holland Festival in co-production with Frascati Productions.
In A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction and Sea of Silence, Floor renewed her collaboration with opera composer and singer Annelinde Bruijs, with whom she is creating a new, socio-political form of opera. In it, classical conceptions of opera are questioned and transformed into big, vulnerable and political gestures.
In autumn 2022, Floor co-directed Atropa, the intersectional tragedy on techno and trap, with Naomi Velissariou at Toneelhuis (in coproduction with Theater Utrecht and Orkater).
In March 2023, Floor will perform the multidisciplinary battlefield of dreams, about the dilemmas surrounding procreation, at Frascati Productions and in coproduction with Theater Utrecht.
Press
"Het razend knappe, fysieke spel, met ronduit gevaarlijke botsingen en Harings prachtige tekstbehandeling, verlenen deze voorstelling een gruwelijke schoonheid."
★★★★ de Volkskrant over Sea of Silence"In ‘Sea of silence’ giet regisseur Floor Houwink ten Cate een verhaal over huiselijk geweld in een vervreemdende vorm. Hierdoor ligt de nadruk op het perspectief van de kinderen, en komt het drama aan als een mokerslag.”
★★★★ NRC over Sea of Silence“Wat een rollercoaster dit stuk! Als vormonderzoek tussen fysiek theater en opera geslaagd, een enorme prestatie ook van de acteurs.“
Theaterkrant over Sea of Silence"Regisseur Floor Houwink ten Cate maakte samen met acteur Benjamin Moen een theatersolo over de identiteitscrisis van de moderne man. In een ware tour-de-force worstelt Moen met wat het betekent om een man te zijn, en om als man te worden behandeld."
★★★★ NRC over One Man Show"Een zeer originele voorstelling die flonkert, irriteert en imponeert door Moens zeer indrukwekkende solo-optreden''
★★★★ Scenes over One Man Show''De filmbeelden zijn zo sterk, de manier waarop haar sterven wordt getoond is weergaloos. Kwetsbaar, heel broos en tegelijk heel krachtig.''
Theaterkrant over Het standaard leven van een standaard vrouw
Productions
