Veda Hille finds pandemic solace at the Cultch, where her Little Volcano erupts again
The deeply personal show, and its new album, provide a refuge of their own
Vancouver’s Veda Hille is a diminutive force who’s brought a big sound to the Cultch during COVID lockdown. Photo by Emily Cooper
The Cultch livestreams Veda Hille and Theatre Replacement’s Little Volcano from October 22 to 25
THE CULTCH became a place of refuge for Veda Hille during the early days of COVID restrictions, with its grand Baldwin piano providing solace and inspiration.
Forced to cancel touring that included a residency in Berlin and a stint in Paris, she was finding it hard to keep creatively energized in her Drive-area abode.
“My piano at home is not very good and it’s in a room that a lot of people are in. And as everyone knows now, when you’re working at home, you can always do the dishes instead of working,” Hille tells Stir.
So she decided to call the Cultch, which welcomed her in. And over the spring she was often the only person inside the East Van heritage venue as she’d work on her music. Other days local director Laara Sadiq, who was beekeeping on the roof of the facility, would be her only audience, listening to the music float up through the rafters.
“I love that piano and I love that room. And I love being away from my family,” Hille says with a laugh.
When not “haunting” the Cultch, Hille began blazing a trail of online concerts which started in the earliest days of lockdown. She became the venue’s official “pandemic artist is residence”. The role continues, with her streaming her most personal work, Little Volcano, from the Historic Stage this week.
Back in the spring, she ended up broadcasting three concerts on the new Side Door platform from the Historic Theatre. Pretty quickly, she learned about the potential and value of virtual concerts. Helping her navigate uncharted territory was fellow East Side musician Dan Mangan, who is also one of the founders of Side Door.
“I’m not very computer-y,” she says with another laugh. “That's not a place of refuge for me! But I watched one of Dan’s shows and I saw it was real: that the audience connection was happening. I had used Zoom for meetings, and now I saw it could be used for art.
“The beautiful thing about doing those shows was that you could be with people,” she continues. “They were moving shows for me.”
That connection is integral to Little Volcano, a unique meld of autobiographical storytelling, theatre, and musical performance crafted with the help of her friends Maiko Yamamoto and James Long of Theatre Replacement. It premiered in a soldout Music on Main and PuSh International Performing Arts Festival coproduction in January.
Classically trained and surfacing in the indie-folk scene of the ‘90s, Hille has grown into one of the city’s most adventurous and prolific artists, dabbling in everything from ornate chamber pop to grassroots art rock. While she’s remained a constant on this town’s music scene, recording an amazing 21 albums, she’s also worked regularly in theatre. Today Vancouverites of all ages and walks of life know her for her pop-culture-savvy work on the Cultch’s wildly popular East Van Panto. But she’s also helped create the hit Pushkin-Tchaikovsky musical adaptation Onegin and Neworld Theatre’s King Arthur’s Night, a radically inclusive project that integrated actors with Down Syndrome.
Veda Hille always gets brutally honest, but Little Volcano may be her most personal show. Photo by Matt Reznek
This week’s show also serves as the launch for her live Little Volcano album, whose witty, gently encouraging lyrics about everything from loss and love to birds, flowers, and frogs seem prescient in these uncertain times. (It’s available in snazzy limited-edition gold vinyl as well as digital download.) With Hille’s crystalline voice rising above the piano keys, she creates music that builds from the spare and deceptively whimsical to darker truths and cathartic crescendos--often within the same song. Take “Miracle”’s shimmering nursery-rhyme poetry “Here is the bird that never flew/Here is the tree that never grew” giving way to the more unsettling “Here is the blood that was never cold/Here are the words unsaid… Swallowed”.
Between the songs, Hille’s anecdotes take you from a Scottish frog pond to a majestic hilltop in Haida Gwaii. You learn about the strong female figures in her life, and about her nickname, Little Volcano.
“I love the way that name has been with me,” she says of the moniker, first given to her by a German reviewer after a show she performed in Hamburg in 1996. “It was such a compliment to me, and to have it stay with me, it’s like your tattoos and how they evolve to mean different things.”
Little Volcano also reflects on her lifelong love of Johann Sebastian Bach, a composer who “calms my busy brain, because it’s so difficult I have to lose myself in it,” she says in the show. “The music allows me to occupy my mind with beauty and order.”
Hille’s work reminds us about the restorative power of art and nature--advice that’s important in these uncertain times. There are also lessons in the way Hille talks about getting through a near-life-threatening bout of breast cancer. Without giving away too much from the show, it was an experience that few fans knew she endured a few years ago. And suffice it to say it’s not the only brush with mortality and serious illness that she talks candidly about in Little Volcano.
“My medical history has been quite a wild ride,” the artist reflects. “I never thought of myself as wildly medicalized, but after I did the show I thought, ‘Wow, I have been in the hospital a lot!’
“I didn't talk about cancer while I had cancer. I didn't want people to worry about me,” she adds. “The show is really about connection with people; this show in particular is about wanting to be with people. And with chemo and radiation and surgery, people can help you through it but there is an essential aloneness to it.”
What comes through most in Little Volcano—the album and the show— may be the ability to get through hard times, that this, too, shall pass, and that we should be grateful for the good things we find right now--like the refuge of the Cultch’s piano.
One of Veda Hille’s themes in Little Volcano is the restorative power of nature. Photo by Stephen Drover
Indeed, Hille has remain grounded and healthy despite all she’s had to give up since COVID descended upon us. She had to cancel hitting the road with this production, and had to accept she wouldn’t be getting to go to Paris with her family.
“Because I’m an experienced artist, I no longer feel like every tour is going to make or break my career,” she says. “It would have been harder as a younger artist.”
In the meantime, she’s happily innovating with online concerts, a format she probably never saw herself embracing even a year ago. For Little Volcano, she’ll even be operating one of the cameras during the livestream; she wants you to see her, flaws and all--a vibe she lovingly calls “community access TV from the ‘80s”.
“We wanted to show people the live theatre elements,” she explains. “With the things I’ve been watching online, I’m more interested in things happening live--in what someone’s doing right now. It was suggested that we shoot this show and then broadcast it, and I thought, ‘But then everything will have to be absolutely perfect.’”
Hille is by now well attuned to the subtleties of livestreaming thanks to all those months at the Cultch. And that’s not bad at all for someone who’s not very computer-y.
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