PuSh Play

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 sense that I was trying to portray myself singularly in the world you know which is again attached to that idea of being being a star I think that the the work that I did with New World and Leaky Heaven and TR just started to make me feel like more of a composer which took the pressure off of any kind of image and allowed me to get a little wild

Gabrielle Martin 07:33

And then you continued working with New World Theatre on King Arthur's Night.

Veda Hille 07:42

was the next project with Niall in that gang and that and for that process New World really we think we spent three years in workshops which was really really fantastic because the company became a true company and that's one of the only experiences I have of that with a large group of actors neurodiverse and and neurotypical really figuring out each other's processes and as Marcus like to say it was a non -hierarchical room as best we could I mean some people are good at some things some people are good at other things but it really became a company in a way that I will always long for I hope we do I hope we do some more with that company sometime

Gabrielle Martin 08:31

I know when we were talking about this list of work, Craig's list cantata stood out. Why does this one stand out in your memory?

Veda Hille 08:42

So I had always wanted to, I had always said I wanted to write a musical. Because the King Arthur and Peter Panties and the stuff with TR is, it's theater that has music in it. They are not musicals.

Veda Hille 08:56

And I'd always wanted to write a proper musical or a rock opera. And then what I heard through the grapevine was that the drowsy chaperone was started as a 15 -minute wedding gift for friends. So someone was getting married.

Veda Hille 09:10

I'm sorry, I don't know who, and their friends made a little 15 -minute musical for them. And then it went so well that they thought they'd keep going. And I thought, what a fantastic model. So with the help of TR, Theatre Replacement, I started a project called 20 -Minute Musicals, where we commissioned four different writers or pairs of writers to make a short musical.

Veda Hille 09:34

And so Jeff Berner did one about, oh gosh, who was the guy, it's not Terry Fox, it was called A Distant Second. Is this Steve Fonio? A Distant Second, the Steve Fonio story, which was very Jeff Berner, Ryan, funny and odd.

Veda Hille 09:56

And Nick Kurgovich did a prison musical called In the Yard, Having Fun. And Juana Molina from Argentina did a musical. She just came and did her songs with some crazy dancers dressed as jellyfish, which is totally acceptable.

Veda Hille 10:12

And then I wrote a piece with Bill Richardson and Amiel Gladstone, which was all based on Craigslist ads. So it was called Do You Want What I Have Got, a Craigslist cantata. And we did the 20 -minute version.

Veda Hille 10:25

And it was so fun. I had worked with Ami on some other projects, but that was where we slowly realized that we could maybe write musicals that were actually musicals. And so then it started at PUSH in the 20 -minute form, and then PUSH and the Arts Club commissioned it to become a full musical, which it did in 2012.

Gabrielle Martin 10:50

in 2012. Yeah. Okay. So from 2009, and then you went into further development.

Veda Hille 10:57

Yeah, so then it was really tricky because it was a musical proper, but it was all direct addressed to the audience because we chose to just embody the craigslist ads as best we could and just have them asking the audience if they had what they wanted.

Veda Hille 11:16

It was a really beautiful project and went quite far, went to Toronto and New York and toured around Canada. God, it's hard to remember everything.

Gabrielle Martin 11:28

But yeah, I feel like I remember, I don't think I saw that work, but I feel like I remember just that name, and having heard your music already comes to life in the imagination in a great way.

Veda Hille 11:41

Yeah, and we got to do that piece again in the pandemic with the coach in an online distance. That is how I saw it. I was wondering why...

Gabrielle Martin 11:52

I have such vivid memories of this work. I know that I wasn't here at that time, but yes. Okay, now, yes, it's great. Thank you.

Veda Hille 12:00

Well, and it works that it works so well as an online piece I think it's one of the best things I've been a part of for you know We were all trying very hard to do interesting online work But that one because it is a series of ads worked perfectly and it was it felt like it came into its own again Because you know Craigslist is kind of old -school now But I think that the human center of that piece is still lively

Gabrielle Martin 12:25

and selling stuff online, it's not, it's not out of date. It's not done, not over, yeah. And okay, so if you can just take us from this Riot Life and Field Study, you know, all the way through Little Volcano in 2020, can you talk about how your practice grew or shifted in that time?

Veda Hille 12:44

think really my practice shifted because I had to finally acknowledge that I am a theater artist as well as a musical person. And Little Volcano, which was the most recent thing I've done at Push, was definitely sort of a coming -of -age of that blending of practices and that acknowledgement that I do I do many things.

Veda Hille 13:13

So we wrote a script with Jamie and Myko based on my life and it was a retrospective of songs from all facets of my life, but it had a script and it had a set and lights and it was really the first time that I made my own theater thing with their help.

Veda Hille 13:33

I couldn't have done it without Jamie and Myko. So I do think that when I look over the course of all the Push things I see myself sort of starting in one zone of primarily music and primarily like the center of the music and then then discovering all the different ways that I can contribute and the giant machine that is theater and performance and then and then finally making my own first tiny machine in 2020.

Veda Hille 14:04

And you talk about how

Gabrielle Martin 14:06

in your early work as a rock star you were centered and then there was kind of this many projects where you were a collaborator and in compared to that early work decentered and yet then this little volcano piece brought you back to the center of the work but this time using theatrical form.

Gabrielle Martin 14:31

Equally it was the music.

Veda Hille 14:34

Yeah, I would say so. I would say so. It felt like a real, and it was something that was really hard for me to perform, which was also what I wanted. I love watching people have to really work their stuff, and I wanted to have it be so hard to perform that I couldn't possibly wander off in my brain and think about other things.

Veda Hille 14:53

Hard technically.

Gabrielle Martin 14:55

hard emotionally. Technically. Okay.

Veda Hille 14:57

Yeah, yeah, emotionally is always rolling around, but I don't think you should strive for hard emotions. If it happens, it happens.

Gabrielle Martin 15:07

That sounds like more of an emerging career goal.

Veda Hille 15:11

I had that time, as we all did.

Gabrielle Martin 15:18

Yeah, I would love to hear your thoughts on what you see as the cultural context of Push, having been in those early festivals and its significance for the city and for your own work.

Veda Hille 15:31

Yeah, well I realized we should talk about one other thing, which was that I was a co -curator for Club Push for many years as well, and that was another side, so that was Push enabling me to have another side, the curatorial side, be supported, and that was so fun, and we had so many great shows.

Veda Hille 15:50

Was that with Tim that you co -curated? Tim, yeah, Tim, and Tim Carlson, and Norman and I, and then Joyce came in, and then Cameron came in. It was a nice floating group. I would say, I think I did it for four or five years in a row, definitely a bunch of ones at Performance Works, and then I think I was involved with maybe one when it moved to the Fox, so mostly the early days of the club, but it was so alive and so exciting,

Veda Hille 16:19

and I really appreciated what I learned about the more administrative and curatorial side of things, because I love throwing a good party, and they taught me how to do it a little better.

Gabrielle Martin 16:35

Yeah, what was the, what were your goals at that time? Your curatorial aims with that? Well, I think it was- With club push at that time.

Veda Hille 16:44

And I think this can, club push in some ways can stand for the cultural context question of push too is because it was kind of a mashup. It was a chance to curate things that would butt up against each other instead of necessarily going smoothly because we were trying to get as many people in that room as possible.

Veda Hille 17:04

And it often, certainly in the early days, we were able to program two or three things plus a DJ or some kind of dance event per night, five nights a week. It was, you know, it was the heyday of people going out.

Veda Hille 17:20

And so I see that as part of the context of push too is that the openness to anything that has a particularity of being hours or being something that we want to be hours from somewhere else. And so it's like the tendrils overlapping through a bunch of worlds and it's just being drawn together by people's interest and enthusiasm.

Veda Hille 17:47

So that's what I've always appreciated about PUSH. And I've always appreciated it felt like it felt like an international festival and it felt like we were not brought in at the side. The locals weren't the thing that you saw if you couldn't get into anything else.

Veda Hille 18:02

I always felt appreciated as an international artist from the festival and that the people that I met through that have had great relationships with people from all over the world because of it. And the work that has been brought in has always expanded my possibilities because the stuff I've seen at PUSH has been incredibly inspiring and that's as important as doing your own shows.

Tricia Knowles 18:31

That was a special episode of Push Play, in honor of our 20th Push International Performing Arts Festival, which will run January 23rd to February 9th, 2025 in Vancouver, British Columbia. To stay up to date on Push 20 and the 2025 Festival, visit pushfestival .ca and follow us on social media at Push Festival.

Tricia Knowles 18:52

And if you've enjoyed this episode, please spread the word and take a moment to leave a review. Push Play is produced by myself, Trisha Knowles, and Ben Charlin. A new episode of our 20th Festival series with Gabriel Martin will be released every Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts.