C-ÎME (Canopée Improvisation Music Ensemble): Pom Bouvier – Ségolène Neyroud – Célia Jankowski – Audrey Lauro – Hanna Kölbel + Lotte Dodion

C-ÎME stands for Canopée Improvisation Music Ensemble and is an all-female collective of Belgian and French musicians. The ensemble gathered around a desire to experiment the meeting of timbres, voids and fullness that silence draws; meanders traced by the oscillations of listening. Behind the sounds spreads out a labile landscape from which rustling of metal, forested voices or crumbles crashes occasionally escape.

Through a luxuriant instrumentarium – made up of instruments, acoustic, electro-acoustic, invented, diverted objects, electronic devices and voices – these eight women artists are using free improvisation to communicate with their surroundings.

The improvisation, thought of as a porous ecosystem, generates an acute attention to the moment and positions us in the mechanisms and symbioses of the living, in social constructions and communications. The music is based on those systems, goes beyond them, sublimates them. Thanks to its diversity C-IME comes up with innovative sounds, creates new stories thanks to a language of its own.

C-ÎME is Pom Bouvier (objects, personal lutherie), Ségolène Neyroud (toy piano, voice, objects), Célia Jankowsky (drone box, percussion, voice, objects), Hanna Kölbel (cello), Audrey Lauro (alto saxophone)

Lotte Dodion (city poet)

Prior to C-ÎME’s concert, city poet Lotte Dodion will do a short performance.

Lotte Dodion (b. 1987) is a poet, performer and poetry missionary. Her mission? To sprinkle wonder into the hamster crawls of this creaking age. Lotte writes in many forms, from understated haiku to absurd audio narrative. But she prefers to set up poetry projects in which she experiments with social design and uses poetry as a medium for connection. For example, she used poetry to bring together victims and perpetrators of serious crimes, wrote short stories with survivors of World War II and supervised a theater project in which chronically ill patients share experiences with friends and family. Leading up to the Tokyo Olympics, Lotte founded STUDIO HAIKU, a mobile studio that travels to places where poetry is often far away. In hospital canteens, women’s shelters and nursing homes, she creates haiku medals with visitors and residents: alternative medals for the “athletes of ordinary life.

Lotte is fascinated by audio and enjoys collaborating with musicians, including Adriaan de Roover, Annelies Van Dinter and Chantal Acda. From 2017 to 2021, Dodion was business and artistic director of the literary organization VONK & Sons. Previously, as director of the Peace Center of the City and Province of Antwerp, she coordinated Antwerp ’14-’18, the grand city commemoration with pontoon bridge over the Scheldt on the occasion of 100 years of World War I in 2014.

Dodion has appeared at numerous festivals at home and abroad including Crossing Border, the Night of Poetry, Poetry International, Ars Poetica, Incubate and Lowlands. A selection of her work has been translated into French, English, German, Turkish and Arabic. Just recently her second book was published “STUDIO HAIKU, a manual for haiku adventurers. In 2023-2024 she will be city poet of Antwerp.