Timo Tembuyser (b. 1991) rounded off his Master’s studies in Architecture & Urban Planning at Ghent University in 2014 with a thesis on theatre in the city. In this thesis, he questioned the extent to which theatre inspires interpersonal interaction in the urban context, and how the public domain and the specific characteristics of a particular place simultaneously influence the theatre space. The desire to put that theoretical research into practice brought him to the Netherlands, where he graduated in June 2019 as a performer from the Toneelacademie Maastricht and in recent years also trained as a vocalist at the Rotterdam Conservatory (Codarts).
Together with director Naomi Steijger, Timo started the theatrical podcast series Concrete Voices, a magnum opus in which they transform the residents of nine apartment buildings in nine major cities into a grandiose virtual choir. Together, the residents sing a new metropolitan Requiem. Their pilot episode, 88 woningraten, which was made in the Hague, won them first prize in the NTR podcast awards in 2018. Timo and Naomi are currently at the Groeneveen apartment building in Amsterdam Zuidoost working on the third episode, Stemmen Uit Beton, in collaboration with Frascati Productions and the Rochdale housing corporation.
Since 2019, under the wings of Productiehuis Theater Rotterdam, Timo forms a makers’ duo with performer and singer Hélène Vrijdag.
As a performer, he likes to move from one form to another in the fluid landscape of music theatre: from choral concert to physical movement performance to text performance to sound installation. In his own productions, searching for different forms that involve music in a theatrical context always lies at the heart of his work.
