Julyen Hamilton is a dancer, choreographer, musician and teacher whose influential career spans more than four decades. Trained in London during the experimental dance scene of the 1970s, he has become internationally recognised for his pioneering approach to improvisation, creating performances in which movement, text and composition emerge in real time. He has created over one hundred solo works, numerous group pieces and long-term collaborations with dancers, musicians and theatre artists. Through his company ALLEN'S LINE, he develops performances that combine choreographic precision with spontaneity and immediacy. Alongside his work in dance, Hamilton is an accomplished writer and musician, regularly performing with leading improvising musicians including Barre Phillips, Fred Frith and Tristan Honsinger. His artistic practice moves fluidly between dance, language and music, making him one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary performance.
The creative impulse behind HU DIE, as well as the basis for communication between the participating artists, originated in John Zorn’s 1997 music project New Traditions in East Asian Bar Bands. Zorn’s project brought together outstanding musicians including Bill Frisell, Fred Frith, Joey Baron, Samm Bennett, Wayne Horvitz and Anthony Coleman, alongside narrators who used Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese languages as pure melodic material. The texts were written by Arto Lindsay, Myung Mi Kim and Lyn Hejinian.