Ep. 26 - Local is International (2012)

Gabrielle Martin chats with Canadian singer-songwriter and longtime PuSh collaborator, Veda Hille.

Show Notes

Gabrielle and Veda discuss:

• How did the relationship with PuSh begin in 2007?

• How did Theatre Replacement and Neworld help with this introduction?

• How does a company become a true ensemble over time?

• How did Twenty Minute Musicals come to be?

• How to be a theatre artist as well as a musician?

• What is the cultural context of PuSh, and what is its significance to the city?

• What was it like to curate Club PuSh?

About Veda Hille

Veda Hille is a Vancouver musician, composer, theatre maker, and performer. She writes songs, makes records, co-writes musicals, collaborates in devised theatre, and fulfills other interesting assignments as they arise. Veda performs in a wide of array of places, alone or with bands, ensembles, symphonies, and casts. Her career spans 30 years of working in Canada and abroad, and shows no sign of flagging.

Veda spent a few formative years in music school and art school in Vancouver, laying the groundwork for a pretty elusive sense of genre. Her first album, an independent cassette, came out in 1991. She spent the rest of that decade working primarily as a recording and touring indie art-rock artist, releasing 6 more critically revered albums and travelling extensively in North America, Europe, and the UK. In the 90s she also composed scores and played live with many dance works, as well as beginning to explore forms such as song cycles and more experimental production.

In the early aughts Veda began working in theatre in Vancouver, while still continuing to record and tour. At first she considered theatre to be a side hustle, but soon it became clear that she was spending most of her time in rehearsal halls working on devised theatre, new opera, and contemporary musicals. All that said, Veda's albums continue to be the core of her practice; she has made more than twenty full length recordings. Some are cast recordings from theatre work, and others are collections of songs written around a theme or a time in her life.

Veda's work circles around many recurring interests: above all she writes about the natural world, amazement and the unknown, and the intricacies of human relationships. She strives for an ecstatic connection through weird detail, the universe visible through a microscope. All fancy language aside though, Veda Hille chases down the songs that are in her head and does her best to deliver them to the world, beautifully.

Land Acknowledgement

This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.

It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.

Show Transcript

Gabrielle Martin 00:02

Hello and welcome to Push Play, a Push Festival podcast featuring conversations with artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form. I'm Gabrielle Martin, Push's Director of Programming, and in this special series of Push Play, we're revisiting the legacy of Push and talking to creators who've helped shape 20 years of innovative, dynamic, and audacious festival programming.

Gabrielle Martin 00:23

Today's episode features Veda Hilly and is anchored around the 2012 Push Festival. Veda Hilly is a Vancouver musician, composer, theatre maker, and performer. She writes songs, makes records, co -writes musicals, collaborates in devised theatre, and fulfills other interesting assignments as they arise.

Gabrielle Martin 00:42

Veda performs in a wide array of places, alone or with bands, ensembles, symphonies, and casts. Her career spans 30 years of working in Canada and abroad and shows no sign of flagging. Here's my conversation with Veda.

Gabrielle Martin 01:00

It's a beautiful day. We are here on the stolen, ancestral and traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil -Waututh. It is an absolute privilege to be here and we're sitting under a tree.

Veda Hille 01:16

Yeah in your backyard planted by my landlord's mother in the 50s nice camellia

Gabrielle Martin 01:22

Yeah, thanks for having me over. This is a really nice opportunity for me also to get to know your your practice and in part through the relationship of your work with the festival.

Veda Hille 01:33

It's been astounding just looking at your list that you sent me of the stuff I've done at Push. It's like some of the most major work of my career and then such a variety of work with so many people.

Veda Hille 01:44

It was nice to remember. Remember.

Gabrielle Martin 01:48

Yeah, so it started in 2007. Push presented this Riot Life and Field Study, and I'll just share what you're referencing, this beautiful list of projects, 20 Minute Musicals in 2009, Happy Birthday Teenage City in 2011, your collaboration with New World Theater on Peter Panties in 2011, Do You Want What I Have Got?

Gabrielle Martin 02:12

A Craigslist Cantata, which was a project with Bill Richardson and Emile Gladstone in 2012, collaboration with New World on King Arthur's Night in 2018, and Little Volcano in 2020.

Veda Hille 02:26

I've been very busy. Thank you Push for helping me out with that. So yeah I was trying to remember the beginning of my relationship with Push. I mean the first so the first time I was presented was the was this right life.

Veda Hille 02:40

Yes. And that was a commission from Push. So that was a commission for a song cycle and that came out of conversation with Norman. I'm trying to remember if he gave me any parameters but I don't think so and the thing so that's a that's a song cycle about grief and written written a year of grief for me and but mining relationships with hymn music and then involving I think like an eight or nine piece ensemble.

Veda Hille 03:16

Wow. Yeah so it was a it was a great musical opportunity because you know that's a large a large piece of work you know and hours hours with the music and the ability to have time with such a large ensemble to work out the arrangements and of course we recorded it as well and I believe that I also had the album release at Push the next year alone maybe.

Veda Hille 03:43

Maybe not.

Gabrielle Martin 03:44

How did you get to that point in conversation with Norman that he offered you this commission?

Veda Hille 03:52

It's all a little vague in my mind, but I'm pretty sure that I came into the push fold through my relationships with theater replacement primarily, because I was the in -house composer for theater replacement starting in around 2003.

Veda Hille 04:07

So that was a moment, I guess in the 90s when I got started, I was mostly an indie rock alt musician touring with my band and making records. But on the side when I was very young, like in my 20s, I was always playing music for dance classes.

Veda Hille 04:27

And that got me into composing for dance. So even in those early days when I just had my focus on rock stardom, I was already starting Diverge. And pretty soon after that, I wrote a song, an album about plants and like that whole pop music thing didn't really stick around for me.

Veda Hille 04:47

So that was... So somewhere in there. I turned to theater. Yeah, well, I think I was through seeing Leaky Heaven Circus that I really got. And that's where I met Michael and Jamie. I met them through a Leaky Heaven production that I was part of.

Veda Hille 05:06

And then I started to really get embedded in the theater scene through that. So it must've been in those days that I started hanging with Norman and doing things. I would have thought that a theater piece would have been my first push deal.

Veda Hille 05:20

But I guess I managed to scooch in the side and keep it with music.

Gabrielle Martin 05:24

And then your collaboration with the New World over the years has been significant for your practice. So the first Veda Hilly New World collaboration that was part of PUSH was Peter Panti's, and that was also a Leaky Heaven project, right?

Veda Hille 05:42

It was Leaky Heaven and New World together and it's a collaboration with Marcus Yusuf and Niall McNeil of course. Niall is a writer who also lives with Down syndrome and Marcus and he have a very long relationship so but Stephen was the one who came to me for that project and we went for coffee and he said we're going to do a version of Peter Pan that Niall is writing with Marcus called Peter Panties and I said yes yes before I was there I was like yes I'm into that and so then they fed me a ton of the script and I just took it away to I had a residency in Berlin and I went away and wrote a bunch of sketches of songs and then brought it back to the gang and that it was just a wild a wild show and a wild process of figuring out there because everybody was so involved and there were so many offers there was a lot of offers and I I would I've actually never watched the the documentation of that show I would like to because it was yeah my memories are just nuts I had a band of 14 year old boys so it was just me and all these teenagers and they would just always be drawing stupid things on my score and we were up on a scaffold and there was incredible stuff going on all around and then and we made a record of that of that music because I loved it so much just had all this chaos in it and it really helped break me out of the