On November 6, 2024, I visited Carole Itter in her home/studio in Strathcona to talk about performance and site-specific art in Vancouver. Over a beautiful home-cooked pot of soup and spread of snacks (including, as you will see, the dolmades that are a part of the ecology of Carole’s next film), our conversation wended and wandered between the personal and the collective; between the past, the present, and the future; between the kitchen and the studio. Wherever we tread, the dialogue was full of curiosity and laughter. Of particular interest in this conversation was Itter’s participation in a 1965 site-specific performance choreographed by dancer and University of British Columbia professor Helen Goodwin that took place at the newly opened Simon Fraser University [SFU] campus on Burnaby Mountain. In it, dancers dressed in long, red, flowing gowns, marched in procession to improvised drum and flute music, and scattered handfuls of poppy seeds on campus’s bare lawns with the idea that, for years to come, fields of poppies would bloom there (they did not). In the memory of this unrecorded performance, I find a compelling grain of “the speculative” that is at the heart of this issue’s inquiry. I am grateful for Itter’s long integration in, and indeed profound influence on, performance and otherwise embodied art in Vancouver and its wider circles. This issue is indebted to her life’s practice that treats the whole surround of her work—human and nonhuman actors, materials and environments—as beloved collaborators.

—Deanna Fong, January 23, 2025

Deanna Fong

Thank you for the soup.

Carole Itter

You may want salt and pepper.

DF

No, no, I think it’s perfect. It’s nice and lemony. Did you put in lemon?

CI

Yes, juice of a whole lemon.

DF

Mmm, it’s delicious. Mmm. It makes it nice and bright.

CI

It works in everything.

DF

Mm-hmm. Okay. So, where do we start?

CI

Well, you’ll have to give me some more context for how you use the word “speculative.”

DF

Maybe I should start by saying that I’ve had this poppies performance in my mind for about 10 years, ever since you first told me and Janey Dodd about it when we interviewed you about the UBC Arts Festival in the ‘60s.[1] I’ve been sitting with that story and that image for years. I was moved by the idea of the performance in the first place, but the thing that always stood out in my mind was not what actually happened, but your imagination of what would have followed.

CI

Which didn’t.

DF

But that doesn’t mean that it’s not still a very potent idea. And so, this idea of what might have been also resonates with a recurring situation of gendered labour in the arts: there are so many things that we intend to be a certain way or to have a certain outcome, and then all of a sudden our time, and our resources, and our finances are just kind of like eaten up by other things—families, day jobs, teaching gigs and the like. But that doesn’t mean that the original idea isn’t still somehow viable and potent. Even if it doesn’t materialize in the form that it was intended to be. I think that’s what I meant by it.

CI

Makes me think of children, especially little girls, when they’re planning something together. They’ll spend a great deal of time talking through an idea for a little theater event or something. And they’ll talk, and talk, and talk, and their imaginations are just going like crazy. Somehow the piece never gets realized, but that’s okay with them because they’ve had it going heavily in their imagination all the time.

DF

Yeah, and sometimes the realization of it isn’t even the important thing. The imagination of it is, in itself, enough to consider it real in a certain way. Well, maybe a good place to start would be to get your recollection of how it happened.

CI

You’ve already got it recorded somewhere, don’t you?

DF

I don’t. I never recorded that. Which is the funny part of me being so interested in this story. It’s got this double layer to it in that you passed it on to me, but we didn’t record it. There was no official version. It’s just my memory of your memory, both of which are fallible.

CI

Okay, let me see. I remember a maximum of seven or eight of us. There’s a picture of it that I think I saw it up on the walls of a civic art gallery not that long ago. The photograph stays in my mind. I mean, I don’t think I would make up a photograph. It was a beautiful photograph. I don’t know if I’m in it or not. I could almost draw it out for you because it’s just a side shot of a number of people parading along. I remember it as a black and white photograph too, but I recall that it was all red that we were wearing.

Helen Goodwin was a remarkable person. Everyone says that, I’m sure. She had a way of gathering people together and then allowing them to open up and decide how to do something. We moved out across the field at the top of this big incline. I think at the time it was just dirt, but dirt doesn’t last for longer than a year here because everything grows so fast. All the wild stuff comes in really fast.

DF

It all becomes blackberries.

CI

Yes, exactly. Blackberries. We stationed ourselves maybe 30 or 40 feet apart—this is in my imagination, and I hope you get another story of it, too—and we’ve each got a bag of poppy seeds slung across our shoulders, and we’re scattering the seeds and we’re moving downhill to the rhythm of drums. When we got to the bottom of the hill, we did a parade all around SFU outdoors. It was in between semesters, so there was nobody around. We were our own audience. We just paraded up and down over all sorts of things.  Felt like we owned the place.

DF

Was Goodwin leading the procession?

CI

I would imagine so at that point, yes. There was no preset route or anything. It just unfolded. We were exploring the architecture, you might say.

A detail that just came to me more recently was that it was me who was sent out to buy the seeds. I remembered it because I remember how heavy they were, when I bought that many pounds of seeds.

DF

What was the occasion for the performance? Not that there needs to be an occasion.

CI

Goodwin explained that she was good friends with the architect, Arthur Erickson, and the funding for the landscaping had run out once the university had been built. He was very upset about that because though landscaping should be a part of every major project, it’s often the one thing that gets chopped off at the end if funds run out. So, Goodwin came to the rescue, and she said, “We’ll bring in a million seeds and put poppies everywhere.”

DF

Which is funny, because it’s quite different from the way that he narrates it, which is that it’s this very deliberate, purposeful decision. Actually, I should pull the paragraph where Erickson talks about it. Here it is:

“One sunny late April evening, members of our office, several faculty, students and friends gathered about Helen Goodwin, a UBC dance teacher, on the slopes below the theatre. We had twenty pounds of poppy seed and several bottles of Faisca.”[2]

What’s Faisca?

CI

I think it’s an Italian wine. I don’t remember anybody drinking. I mean, how can you drink and play a flute, sprinkle seeds, and march around at the same time?

DF

“To each person we gave a yard of red cotton to adorn themselves and a musical instrument, a simple percussion type. In the delicate spring air and splendid colours of the evening, we were overcome by a Bacchic exuberance. In a long procession, with strips of red flying from arms and legs and hair, we snaked and danced and twirled across the fields, around the running track, up the stairs to the Mall and down the Mall to the Quad. But for us, it was deserted. It was a truly pagan rite, and just as the sun was lowering Helen mounted the Quad steps like a high priestess. Each one of us, without bidding, came forward silently to lay our instrument at her feet as she invoked the setting sun.”[3]

CI

Well, he was quite a bit older. He wouldn’t have been part of the hippy scene at the time. Yeah. So, he was looking at it differently than we were.

DF

In terms of the participants, who do you remember being there? You said Maxine Gadd?

CI

Yes, and very likely Judith Copithorne, too, because they were real activists. I was sort of a part-time, step-in-and-out… [both laugh]. They would be involved in anything that came along, so I’m sure they were there. I think Evelyn Roth was also there.

DF

What was the man’s name that you mentioned?

CI

Dennis Vance. He was active as an improvising dancer, and he also did a lot of electronic stuff.

DF

Did you have relationships with these people already from previous events, like the Arts Festival?

CI

Certainly, I had with Helen. That arts festival was a really big thing, so if you had any inclination in the arts, you wanted to be there. There weren’t many festivals in those days. This was the first time. But Helen, by chance, had been my PE teacher in my first year at UBC—PE being Physical Education. When she found out that I really wanted to be an artist, she gave me these huge rolls of paper about this wide and all sorts of probably crayons—this was before felt pens—and set me up in the gymnasium, which had benches going up and along. She said, “You go up in those benches and roll it out and draw what you like from what we’re doing.” I thought, “What a gift.”

DF

During the PE class?

CI

Yes, that was what I could do during PE class [laughs]. So how can I forget that?

DF

That’s amazing.

CI

But we met again somehow, too. Or maybe I just joined her group, thinking, “Well, this is so much fun.” She really liked that. Rhoda Rosenfeld took some beautiful pictures of her Environmental Opera. Have you seen them?

DF

Yeah.

CI

They’re just full. So, Rhoda was around at that time. All those photographs were acquired by the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery. So, they’re up. They display them now and then. They’re also interspersed throughout Lorna Brown’s book Beginning with the Seventies—maybe 10 or 15 photographs.[4] They’re used all through the book. It ties the whole book together, so that’s wonderful.

DF

So, we have your memory of the event. But the thing that really stuck out to me, and has been germinating in the back of my mind for a decade now, is the way that you described what you imagined would come from the performance: these enormous, waving, burning fields of poppies that would bloom year after year.

CI

Well, I think we all thought that. That was the purpose of the event. I guess there wasn’t a gardener among us who knew how fussy poppy seeds are to germinate. The birds were probably following us and getting a little high, too [both laugh].

I’m a gardener now, but I guess I wasn’t much of a gardener back then, because I should have known better. I mean, I really thought we were going to see a whole field of poppies. Millions and millions of red poppies. The seeds are very tiny and need to be germinated, and none of us knew that.

Since then, I’ve tried to grow poppies. My partner Al [Neil] and I were determined to grow poppies that got you high. This would have been in the ‘80s. I ordered the seeds from a catalog thinking, “How come they’re selling blue poppies?” or whatever it was. I ordered the right kind of seeds because I did a little research. I germinated them and got them started on top of the fridge. I was going to put them out in the garden. I hardened them off when they were about four inches high. I had 48 of them. Can you imagine? We only got about four blossoming poppies out of it [both laugh].

DF

They really are particular.

CI

Well, the slugs really liked them. They liked them better than anything else they’d ever met.

DF

They were having fun.

CI

Out of the four poppy seedlings—they were about this high—we let them go to seed, and we did all the things to make the tea together. We did that and then we each had a cup of tea. And then we fell asleep [laughter]. I think to this day, “Was it worth it?”

DF

It’s a lot of work for an afternoon nap. So poppies have been a bit evasive in your life. But quite honestly the idea of the poppies performance has become a shorthand between me and my friends as a metaphor that applies to so many things. Jacquie [Zong-Li Ross] and I now refer to “poppies of the mind” as shorthand for things that are wonderful ideas but which never come to fruition. That’s where the idea for this Speculative Feminisms issue came from. There can still be something so potent about the imagination of something happening. In fact, in its failure to launch, sometimes the idea of it is, in a way, shielded from a less-than-perfect reality.

CI

There’s a parallel for me when I did that film called Tarpaulin Pull (2006). I sewed many old tarpaulins together on the beach. I was alone doing it all and I thought, “This is just beautiful. It’s just beautiful to look at.” I was using all different kinds of blue twines and the rotten tarpaulins were really a mess. So, I was weaving them and patching them and I used a needle about this long and I used garden twine and yarn and everything I could find. I was bringing them to life again, but kind of a useless life.

DF

An aesthetic life.

CI

Yeah, right. I had to work every day during the high tides in June. So when the tide was really out, I’d roll them all out and start sewing again. Then, knowing the tide would be in, in another few hours, I’d roll them back up again and store them high up on the beach and then continue the next day. I thought, there’s just got to be a camera around here to record this somehow. I didn’t know it was going to be so nice. My cousin from the prairies was visiting on one of those days and she had a tiny little camera. She took about six pictures as I was sitting doing different things—maybe getting the cord ready or something. We were able to use those stills at the beginning and the end of the film when we ran the credits, because it told a little more of a story.

Next Krista Lomax, the filmmaker, came along. She had a great camera, which she had on loan. She was just game for anything ever. And I said, “I’ll tow it behind the boat, and I’ll row it quite close to the shoreline. Will you walk along holding the camera shoulder-high in the water?” So she did that. It was just beautiful, and it worked so well, the whole thing. What I did was row it all the way to the big wharf at Cates Park. I knew that beyond the wharf there was an area where boats could be backed up into the water—what is called a boat launch. There were great big garbage bins there. Going contrary to the cars backing their big power boats down to the water, I rowed our little row boat onto the same launch. I pulled up all the tarpaulins, rolled them all up, carried them, and dumped them into the garbage bin and that was the end of the film.

But, you know, if the ocean hadn’t been there, and if Krista hadn’t been there with the camera, there would be nothing to talk about. I would have probably forgotten it happened.

DF

Well, maybe.

CI

Maybe. Well, maybe not.

DF

But this is the essence of performance work, right? What remains after the performance, whether that has a material or immaterial form.

CI

I think so. Sometimes I think that’s where I start, too. When I first lived up at Roberts Creek, it was in a tiny, complete cabin on a chicken farm. So, I was surrounded by 200 chickens every day. Their roost was a shed to the side of the cabin, and they were let in and out according to the egg farmer. I got to watch chickens all the time and got beautiful eggs out of them. A lot of times the shell isn’t perfect, but the egg itself is fine. These ones don’t make it to the market. So, I collected them, and there were just some really weird eggs.

DF

Selected dissident eggshells [laughter].

CI

And then I thought, “Oh, I’m going to make myself a chicken costume. That’ll be easy to do.” I made two different chicken costumes, and they were filmed, but I’ve lost the films. I don’t know where they are now. And then I thought, “Well, I’ll make myself a costume of an egg, an egg yolk.” And that was really easy to do, and the photograph is up there on the wall, but this time I lost the costume. I lent it out to some event and it never came back. I got a good documentation of it, but now that’s all I’ve got of that. 

I would slither along the floor on my backside with two or three layers of polyethylene over me, some of it thick, some of it thin. On top my body was a hoop, a hula hoop. I got a great big piece of bright yellow fleece and secured it around the hoop. And I lay underneath it all and went moving along.

DF

Yes, I’ve seen stills of it. The rest is up to the imagination.

CI

But it started by being on a chicken farm and getting so involved with eggs and chickens. So they were sort of the introduction to doing it. Yeah. So, I do through conceiving of, and composing and planning for.

DF

I’m just looking at your former goose costume from Please Meet the Geese on the table over there. Does it come with this kind of attendant kind of imaginary of what it will be like when you perform it? And is there always something a little striking about the difference between what you imagine and what happens?

CI

Oh, yes, for sure—shocking when I think about it. What I imagined from looking out at the audience through the black mesh where the goose eyes were was a greyed image of 250 solemn people in the audience looking at a silly goose strutting across a narrow stage in a life-sized papier mâché outfit. But within a few minutes, there was a lot of hooting, hollering and clapping from these same people and I sensed immediately how powerful an audience’s response can be. From grey to technicolor.

I’ve met a puppeteer just in the last couple of months. She was a former student of mine, and we met through a mutual friend again. She studied in Prague for three years with a master puppeteer, so she knows a lot about puppetmaking. She’s introduced me to some books, and I’m introducing her to some of my geese ideas. We’ve been looking at puppeteers called the Handspring Puppet Company. They’re in South Africa. Even William Kentridge has worked with them. Remarkable stuff they do, just remarkable. One of the amazing things about puppets, when you’re using puppeteers, is that your audience accepts them. They almost forget that the real puppeteer is there making the movement. They just accept it as part of the show.

So in my next project, Charred Geese Searching for a Ceasefire, that’s what I want our puppeteers to look like. Both Beth Agosti, the puppeteer, and my assistant Anna de Courcy are shaping the mechanics of this one. There will be two puppeteers that will hold up the wings of the goose and help them to flap. There’s going to be a great deal of, in my mind, straggliness. The goose is going to stagger. I saw this only once in Canada geese—they must have either been given some poison or got into some sort of nerve food. I don’t know what had happened to them. Geese are staid, right? But these were really neurological scenes. They were just going crazy from something that had happened to them. This was out at the cabin, and it took about a day and a half for them to recover, to come back to normal. But I thought, I want to see the goose do that kind of staggering as she moves across the sand. She’s not going to be comfortable. She’s not going to be able to move very easily. She may fall down once or twice and get up again, but she will move across the beach in a very urgent manner. And that’ll be it.

DF

That’s heartbreaking.

CI

It is. It’s very serious, this film. Every single part of it. The other part of it is up here [gestures to a shelf in the studio]. Let me show you these 44 geese that will stick in the sand. I suppose you could call this another performance, too. Every one of them looks like this. They’re positioned in the sand, and there’ll be rows and rows of them. They kind of disappear into each other because there’s so much reflection of the other geese. The film will show them being set up—there’s seven of us doing it. Half the people will be setting up while the other half are filming it with their cell phones, and then we’re going to switch so that we get it from all different angles.

DF

I think I saw some test footage of these being set up, and then some actual geese showed up.

CI

Yes, about 60 of them! I was leading them along because I had an apple and I was giving them a little bits of apple. You can’t see that in the test footage, but I know geese well enough to know that these were very tame and they loved the apple. Up at Dollarton the geese are very wild, but they have their routes and they know where people are eating their sandwiches, and where kids play. They’re beggars. They go along the route and they get to eat at all the way. So if the live geese happen, well they happen. We’ll make it part of it, but if it doesn’t that’s okay, too.

DF

And what are these?

CI

These are the “Ghosts of Geese Searching for the Illusion of Fresh Running Water”. Each one of these takes a few hours to make, so we just had a little factory going here for about a month and a half. One of the things we’re experimenting with is, we call it an “inverted codpiece” [both laugh]. We’ve got to get a better name. That’s what it looks like [shows waistbelt with black painted can mounted in the centre].

DF

Are they made of tin cans? What kind of cans are they?

CI

You don’t recognize them?

DF

It’s too big to be salmon.

CI

They’re dolmades.

DF

Ah, yes.

CI

So, you can see I’ve been eating a lot of them in order to make my puppetry. All the weight of the puppet is going down onto the codpiece. It’s not an awful lot of weight, but you have to walk very slowly with it. We thought rather than having the person having to carry the weight, they have a little extra support. These pieces will come in very handy when we’re doing the really big goose puppet. And the belt of the codpiece is sewn from these pieces of heavy-duty rubber from the innards of a bicycle wheel. This is one half of an inner tube. I’ve got a box full of these things. I go to the bicycle store quite often. I’m the little old lady who says, “Do you have any more inner tubes?”

DF

Do you explain what it’s for?

CI

No, I don’t. I say, “I’m not into S&M, it’s just I’m an artist” [laughter].

DF

It’s nice to spend some time with the materials. This is very interesting actually, because I’m feeling resonances of Helen Goodwin in here with this idea of improvisation within the structure.

CI

Right.

DF

You create the circumstances for something that might happen, for something to happen, and then whatever happens—

CI

You say, “Hooray, hooray!” [both laugh].

Could you drink a little herbal tea or English tea?

DF

Oh, I would love that. English tea, please.

CI

The only thing I have to go with it is oat milk. And maple syrup.

DF

That’s fine. I could have both. Actually, if you don’t mind, I’m just going to keep on eating away until there’s nothing left.

[1] Deanna Fong and Janey Dodd. “Event and Archive: Remapping the Poetry Reading Series in Canada, 1957–1974,” Journal of Borderlands Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 35 no.1 (2020): 1-18.

[2] Arthur Erickson, Arthur Erickson on Learning Systems (Montreal: Concordia University Press, 2022), 88.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ed. Lorna Brown, Beginning with the Seventies (Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 2020).