Little Volcano

The Cultch remounts Little Volcano, previously seen at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts in April 2019. This is a re-posted review of that production.

Live-streamed from The Cultch, October 22-25, 2020
Tickets from $29 at 604-251-1363 or thecultch.com

Posted October 19, 2020

[At Shadbolt Centre for the Arts until April 27, 2019
Tickets: Youth $15/Adults $36 from boxoffice@burnaby.ca or 604-205-3000]

[Posted April 26, 2019]

Little Volcano – half concert, half storytelling – is insanely wonderful. That is, it’s exquisitely beautiful – the kind of beautiful that makes you want to cry. That does not happen to me very often but Veda Hille did that to me on opening night of Little Volcano, produced by Theatre Replacement’s artistic directors  James Long and Maiko Yamamoto.

The blending of J.S. Bach (preludes, mostly) and some of Hille’s songs going back to 1996 is gorgeous – sometimes beginning with one of the preludes, slipping into a Hille song with little glimmers of Bach dancing through. Her description of Bach’s contrapuntal technique – one melody in the left hand, another in the right and a third overlying and embellishing the previous two –  is so neatly explained, you listen to it with an informed ear, especially if you’ve never considered it before.

You can just feel the influence Bach has had on Hille’s life and music: a place of refuge, of quiet and order, often breaking finally into jubilation, exhilaration, ecstasy. That is often the pattern of her songs, too: a quiet simple beginning that moves into grandeur and excitement and then back to simplicity.

Once dubbed ‘The Little Volcano’ in a review following a 1996 piano recital in Hamburg, it’s an  apt descriptor. Quiet, quiet, quiet, building to an exhilarating explosion, then simmering quietly back down.

Hille takes us through her personal story with its strange and life-threatening medical emergencies, pregnancies and relationships – always turning to music for solace.  She tells this story informally – as if she is in the presence of friends – sitting cross-legged in her navy-and-white sailor-suit dress or at the piano, fingers flying but looking at us as she talks.

And it’s full of Hille’s quirky bits of observation, philosophy, irony and self-effacing humour: “I make up rules and then try to follow them. But that’s dumb.”  Or the divergent uses of the word ‘never’: “I will never leave you.” “I have never loved you”. Followed by the haunting, “I will never recover.”

Sophie Tang provides a lightscape that shifts seamlessly from various angles: sometimes dramatically lit from stage right, at other times subtly enveloping Hille in soft, glowing light. Backdrop to Hille, piano and bench and record player is Elia Kirby Productions/GNW Scene Shop’s rendering of Sectional View of the Crust of the Earth, painted by American artist Orra White Hitchcock and exhibited in the American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan.

“I was artsy as fuck” in high school, Hille tells us. She had, she says, a “busy brain.” She’s still artsy as fuck. And she still  has a busy brain. But she has now, she says “the power of age”.  Add to that the grace of age, the wit of age, the generosity of age. A line in one of her songs comments on the “bird that never sang” and “the bell that never rang”. Well, Veda Hille is singing and ringing now. She still wants to be, in her words, “your little volcano”. She IS our little volcano.

Bach couldn’t have said it better than Hille’s last words: “I love you like dynamite – KABOOM”.

Don’t miss it. Just tonight and Saturday night.