This residency will focus on further preparations of a large-scale project that will result in a multi-media theatrical piece for Donatienne Michel-Dansac and the Ensemble InterContemporain for 2019. The piece builds upon the previous music theatre piece Parlour Sounds by Patricia Alessandrini. It features the soprano in a home environment of the 1960’s in which household appliances become musical instruments through the use of analog and digital technology. In the new work there will be a similar interaction with household technology, but in a futurist setting.

Using the title “hacking the piano”, the project will bring together two composers who each have their very own approach to the icon of classical music, the piano. This promises to be a thoroughly alternative look at the instrument, radically re- or detuned, taken apart until only the frame remains, and complemented with other instruments and electronics. Patricia Alessandrini starts with a disassembled piano frame, while Tim Mariën will present another chapter in his collaboration with Tiptoe. A performance will take place on October 13 in the framework of Festival 2021 in Leuven and on October 19 in deSingel, in a collaboration with ChampdAction.