A tribute to Ida Carnevale, the founder of the Festival of Lights – and a former Kensington Market resident – who died recently in Italy.
We’re asking people to contribute their memories and facts about her life to bring her scant presence on the internet closer to reflecting what her presence in the Market contributed to our community.
FINDING IDA
By Sylvia Lassam
Ida Carnevale lived for many years at 45 Bellevue Avenue, the first house north of the Green P parking lot. The house, which combined living quarters with a store front, was run-down when Ida moved there in 1981. She lived with her family, consisting of her partner and collaborator, Brad Francis, her son Elisha, and his son Huckleberry. For a while her ex-husband, Tom Burrows, lived around the corner on Nassau Street, to help with the parenting. During her tenancy it became a neighbourhood fixture, a nexus, a place of intense creativity, a social hub, a point of arrival and departure for many. It was a place where great food was shared, where wondrous objects were displayed. It was precarious, with the landlord intent on demolishing the building, and ultimately doing so. By the time it came down Ida was in Italy and Kensington Market was evolving from a raw food market, with interesting shops on the side, into a fast food, bar, and dispensary emporium, from a quirky community into a tourist destination. It’s unlikely that she would have felt at home in the Kensington Market of today, Ida mobilized the residents in ways that still reverberate. Her generosity of spirit permeated the place and there are still many in the Market community who knew her and count her as an inspiration.
But what of her other lives, for she had several? We know her here as the creator of the Festival of Lights, the winter solstice event that transforms the Market every December 21 into a pagan revel. She came here in middle age from away, and she left after 15 years. What happened before and after?
A conversation with Tom Burrows, and a lengthy email from her son, Elisha, help. Ida was born in Mantua on June 16, 1948, the offspring of an haute bourgeois family. There was, apparently, a family connection with the Contini on her father’s side. He was an agrarian lawyer and leftist political activist who died when Ida was 14. Ida’s mother was from a wealthy family whose fortune was made in the hotel business in Sirmione, on Lago di Garda. Her mother, a trained opera singer, never pursued her craft because of the social stigma attached to performing artists. Ida attended a Catholic girls’ school in Verona during the winter. She wore her school uniform, which included white cotton gowns for bathing. The summers were spent in Sirmione. She took a degree in journalism, graduating in 1961 and immediately moved to London to work as an au pair and learn English – she was already fluent in French. The move away was motivated by a desire to remove herself from the social conservatism of her family, especially from her strict and controlling mother, who wanted Ida to marry well. In 1961 Tom Burrows moved to London and Ida was already there, part of a group of wild kids living a bohemian life. She had developed a group of interesting friends, some of whom would meet at a pub on Portobello Road on Saturdays and that’s where Tom and Ida met. Their interests were mainly literary at that time. Bootlegged editions of Henry Miller would circulate and were discussed. Ida was living with an Israeli woman who held Tom’s attention for a time, but eventually Tom and Ida became close and they rented a flat together. Tom was working in a restaurant in Knightsbridge as a waiter at the Hilton, making good money. Life was cheap in London and they lived well. Ida was intrigued by the idea of Canada and wanted to move to Toronto. Immigration would have been difficult so they decided to get married. Both mothers descended on London and arranged the wedding, which took place in 1962.
In 1964 the couple came to Canada. Tom’s father, who had previously arranged for his son to work as a stockbroker, got him a similar job in Toronto, though he was soon fired. Ida, calling up her journalism degree, got a job at Corriere Canadese. Tom went to see an industrial psychologist who gave him a battery of tests and the surprising news that he should be either a clergyman or a sculptor. It seemed that he should go back to school, so a car was acquired and they drove to Vancouver and UBC. Ida took a course in education and got work as an elementary teacher in a Catholic School. They both took a creative writing course, which Tom failed and Ida aced. Tom moved to art history, then branched out into studio courses and immediately gravitated to sculpture. They lived in a house with Toni Onley, Tom’s brother-in-law. In 1967 they moved back to London so Tom could do post-graduate work at St. Martin’s, funded by a Canada Council grant. The trip to London was protracted. They went via New York, then Tangiers, Genoa, with a stay in Mantua at Ida’s mother’s apartment. Signora Carnevali was appalled at her son-in-law’s beatnik clothes and wouldn’t allow him out of the apartment until the tailor had been called and a suitable wardrobe produced. Back in London they found living quarters in a factory, until they left a tap on and flooded the teddy bear factory below.
By this point the relationship was strained, but they acquired a VW van and made another trip through Europe, driving through Yugoslavia, Turkey and Greece. It was the summer of 1968, with the Czech rebellion in full swing. Driving back through Italy they again stopped in Mantua, but the van had been broken into and the Italian wardrobe had been stolen. Elisha’s cousin Rosella remembers that Ida arrived in the shortest possible mini-skirt that scandalized her mother and the neighbours even more than Tom’s shabby attire. “This was my mother… always challenging and always full of playful provocativeness,” Elisha recalls. Ida stayed with her mother and Tom returned to London alone, finding another studio with fellow sculptor Jerry Pethick. When Ida came back they lived separately, but continued to see one another; Ida became pregnant. Tom returned to Vancouver and a summer position at the UBC art gallery, living in his car, then moving to a platform in the Maplewood Mud Flats, which he gradually transformed into a structure with found building materials. Elisha was born in 1969, and he and Ida flew to Vancouver. She was dressed in a St. Laurent suit. Tom picked them up at the airport and drove them to the Mud Flats.
For a time they lived on welfare, but Tom eventually got a job at UBC, lecturing from 1969 to 1972, a job that he didn’t much like. Ida, meanwhile, was inexplicably thriving in the Mud Flats. Life was hard, with an infant and no electricity or hot water. Tom often stayed in Vancouver overnight. However, she seems to have bonded with her neighbours. Paul and Linda Spong, who were part of the group that later became Greenpeace lived on the Mud Flats, and Linda and Ida were close.
Jim Munro, a musician who lives in Steveston, BC, remembers meeting Tom and Ida, who he describes as a Vancouver ‘art power couple, of sorts’.
Both were extremely generous to me at the time, taking myself under their wing and introducing naïve me to the art world and all it had to offer. In some sort of way that meeting was responsible for so many of the subsequent people I was to meet and associate with up until the present day.
In 1971 residents organized the Dollarton Pleasure Faire, a hippie gathering featuring Joni Mitchell. Tom Burrows couldn’t abide the Faire, but it may have re-awakened Ida’s love of street theatre, remembered from her past in Italy. On December 17, 1971, the City of Vancouver burned down Tom and Ida’s home on the mud flats, after a long battle with city officials to save it. Tom went off to Hornby Island, where he still lives, and Ida moved to a communal house on 7th Avenue on the Farview slopes of Vancouver.
Ida’s enthusiasm for theatre contrasted sharply with Burrows’s disdain for the events staged on the mudflats; she seems to have been inspired by the idealistic aspects of the events she witnessed,[15] and to have interpreted them more generously as a continuation of European traditions of street performance and variety theatre—which tended to be itinerant, integrated with agrarian festivals, and overtly political—that she recognized from her youth in Italy. Where Tom saw spectacle, Ida saw carnival, and she took up her surname as a vocation. Her seasonal and nomadic, implicitly feminist approach to theatre culminated in the values of the solstice festival that she produced in Toronto in the 1990s: communal, processional, participatory, informal, and poly-cultural, with strongly neo-pagan and pantheistic overtones. Her unique, highly personal fusion of the local and global suited Kensington Market perfectly, and she pursued it with an assurance born of the belief that it was available to all for the taking. It’s no surprise that the festival continues today—her legacy to Toronto. [Kenneth Hayes, ‘Freehold’]
In 1974 Ida, along with her best friend Mary Macgillivray and others, formed Circus Minimus. Jim Munro, before committing himself to music, was also a member for a couple of years. He remembers it as Ida’s way of establishing herself as a person outside the shadow of Tom, and saying ‘fuck you’ to the formalized art world of which she had been a part.
Jim remembers Ida:
Ida was one of the most distinctive personalities I have ever met in my life. So refreshing. What you saw is who she was. Mercurial is an understatement. Loveable, frustrating. She had a vision of herself and where she fit. The gap toothed Italian beauty. I think that many underestimated her brilliance, to their detriment. She was an artist of the community, and she made things happen by bringing together the most unlikely personalities. All united by the force of her personality and vision. The world was a far richer place when she was about.
Circus Minimus billed itself as ‘The smallest show on earth’. One advertisement for a 1975 show at Open Space in Victoria, says that ‘running away to join the circus was a common fantasy shared by the originators of Circus Minimus. Rather than run, they stayed home to create their own. The members used to be law students, musicians, social workers, anthropologists, fishermen’. A 1978 advertisement from Salt Spring Island, gives short bios for a cast of four, including Ida, Mary McGillivray, musician John Malone, and stage manager Stephen La Frenie. The circulating cast was augmented by papier mache puppets, in the European circus tradition, with Ida and Mary as its creative core. Part of the small avant garde theatre scene in Vancouver, they won many accolades, playing schools, theatres, and festivals.
This period saw her develop her interest in street theatre and undoubtedly led to the development of her site specific theatre practices, which became a hallmark of her artistic practice in Toronto. The period also saw her meeting and studying clowning and theatre under Richard Pochinko, starting in the late 70’s and into the 80’s. [Elisha Burrows, email]
In 1976 Circus Minimus toured across the country, ending in Toronto. Her friend Berenicci Hershorn was on that tour. In 1980 the troupe dissolved and Ida began to work, Elisha in tow, with the Caravan Stage Company, a horse drawn theatre company that toured BC and Alberta, on a production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle. At this point she also began a relationship with Brad Francis that was to last until 1996. His artistic input was crucial to her work in Toronto, and his economic input enabled a stable environment for the family and for Ida’s creative endeavours. In 1981, the family joined the Caravan again for their tour of Ontario with the show Horseplay. The last stop on that tour was Toronto, and Ida and Brad decided to move their family to Kensington Market. They rented on Nassau Street briefly, before finding the house at 45 Bellevue Avenue, where she lived for the remainder of her time in Toronto. It quickly became a centre for artists and locals.
Ken Hayes, ‘Freehold’:
I was living in a large house on Bellevue Avenue in Toronto’s Kensington Market—a house nominally shared by three people but dominated by the outsized personality of the lease-holder, Ida Carnevali. The house was shabby and infested with termites, but its plan was elegant. It was a rare example of a type of home designed for a merchant, with a shop facing the street, and it retained the original, tall, draughty display windows and a recessed central door with an enamelled tin sign. The shop space served as the office of Ida’s theatre company, and its windows were inhabited by giant papier-mâché puppet heads that she used annually in her production of a winter solstice procession through the market. The shop entrance aligned with the door to the living room, which aligned with the arch leading into the kitchen beyond, and that aligned with the door of a large scullery, which aligned with the rear door, forming a perfect enfilade. The ground floor was precisely level with the yard, so when the doors stood open on fine fall days, leaves would blow straight through the house.
Why Kensington Market? Because “in markets, it’s always theatre, there is an interaction between people.” (quoted in Jean Cochran, Kensington, p.131). She mourned the loss of live animal sales in the market, and integrated chicken masks into her first street theatre, in Bellevue Square Park. The Kensington Carnival included music, sideshows, puppet shows and theatre. Her greatest contribution was the Festival of Lights. “Before friends and I gave up the parade because of the severe cold, we had dancingly witnessed a pagan ritual of the victory of good over evil, complete with a fire breather, witches, a snow queen and children bearing roses; a Christian scene which I could not see because of the crowds and a telling and singing of the Hanukkah story with flaming torches” (Kensington Drum 1989). That year the celebration finished with a feast sponsored by the Toronto Tai Chi Association, a steel band and a piñata for the children.
Ida continued to study with the influential clown master, Richard Pochinko, who created a distinctively Canadian form of clowning (although he trained in France) based on individual expression rather than tropes. Pochinko, who died in 1989, was a profound influence on Ida. She created theatre in Bellevue Square Park, and, with Brad, started the Kensington Carnival Arts Society, whose most famous and enduring legacy is the Festival of Lights. The goal of the Society, was to bridge the gap between the Anglophone community and other cultures in our city. Day long events were organized that included street performances, clowns, face paintings, puppets, mimes, and magicians, relying on the participation of community members who were assisted by professional artists and performers. In 1984 the Society produced a musical, cross-cultural version of Romeo and Juliet – “Ho Mao and Julieta”; in 1988 they created “Sons et Lumières – Kensington Sound and Lights”, integrating historical material with a dramatic look at contemporary Kensington Market. They used puppets to portray the sub-cultures in the market, such as cats, rats, dogs, and integrated the relatively new arrival of the punks. The festivals were a new form of community activism, addressing the challenges faced, and providing a process through which these matters could be discussed. Resident participation meant resident interaction. [much of this last paragraph taken from a M.Arch. thesis by Mazyar Mortazavi, Waterloo, 2005]
Elisha Burrows describes his mother’s last years:
In 1986, following the death of her mother, Ida purchased an 800 year uninhabited old farmer’s house in the countryside south of Lake Garda, and began its reconstruction. Located in the small farming hamlet of Campagnolo, an area surrounded by rolling hills and intense bucolic beauty, my mother’s return to Italy and to this particular area, represented a gradual return to the landscape that she had spent her childhood in hunting in with her father. Her arrival to the village, initially caused quite a stir as her free spirit and globetrotting personality were a constant source of gossip in the community. At her funeral many of the locals who attended, commented on how my mother, with her larger than life character, had arrived as an extra-terrestrial and object of curiosity, only to become, with her generosity of spirit and wisdom, a central much loved member of the small community.
The house that she bought initially had only part of a roof, no electricity and or plumbing, but my mother oversaw the rebuilding process of her new house in her typical tenacious and brave style and saw it through to finish. In 1996, following Mike Harris’s cuts to Ontario’s arts funding and her separation with Brad Francis my mom moved back to Italy permanently. She did come back to Toronto yearly for a while working on several shows, before the constant strain of travel and missing the house she loved so much became too much for her.
In Italy, she formed an artistic relationship with filmmaker Franco Piavoli and a group of artists, writers, intellectuals and acted in several of Piavoli’s films. She also began working on local street celebrations in her new home town of Cavriana, directing neighbourhood processions for a yearly celebration called La Capra. This led to work in the nearby town of St Martino, which also had a yearly civic celebration. During this period she also created and played two production at her house
In 2005 my mother, then living with partner Antony Lorraine, developed a spinal stenosis which changed her life forever physically. The condition affected her balance and gave her a lot of pain, but she continued to live her life in the same indomitable way she had always. The physical burden of this condition made life too difficult for my mom to continue in theatre, and so she contented herself with cooking, gardening, her many animals, and the house that she loved so much.
Ida died on September 15, 2020