Julyen Hamilton is a dancer, director, poet, and teacher. Born and raised in England, he trained in London at The Place in the 1970s, a time of radical experimentation. He has been an exponent of innovative performance since that time. His work is mostly improvised: he composes dance works instantly, as well as the spoken texts that usually accompany them. When working with his company, Allen’s Line, he directs dancers and lighting designers to make and perform work through this same immediacy.
            Since the 1980s, he has often performed in close collaboration with live musicians, sometimes in conjunction with readings of his poetry. Currently, Julyen is presenting his new solo, The Immaterial World, and performing duos with bass players Barre Phillips and Jean-Claude Jones (France + Israel); Talk to Me with dancer/poetess Lily Kiara (NL); Bridge with Niamh Condron (Ire); and Lighthouse with French musicians from ARFI. His label, BLUE DOG DVDs, produces videos of his performances on DVD, and a CD of his poetry is to be released in 2011.
            Julyen is well respected for his teaching, which he offers at major training centers throughout the world. He lives in Catalonia, Spain, with his family.
            Julyen divides his work into Performance and Pedagogy. Part one of this interview on the subject of Pedagogy appears in print in CQ’s 2010 Annual issue, Vol 35.1. [Eds]

My time in London and Cambridge

JH: I suppose I want my performances to shed light on human beings—about their concerns, their emotions, and their observations. I think it stems from the fact that I basically come from theatre, which was my introduction to the stage very early on, and also literature—plays, of course, but also poetry and the novel. I was especially steeped in and highly inspired by the literature of England.

NSS: Any particulars jump out?

JH: Of course Shakespeare and the metaphysical poets—John Donne, George Herbert—people from the sixteen hundreds. This was a hugely revolutionary time, with Queen Elizabeth I and the New World, geographically, but also in terms of thought. There was Shakespeare on the one hand and Francis Bacon on the other. There was an explosion of theatre and an explosion of the interior life, or the exposing of the interior life. And although this was four hundred years ago, when I read and took part in those plays, I was very touched by it all. And all of it links with what was happening at the time for me in the 1970s, which was the then-recent legacy of absurdist drama as well as the emergence of the new playwrights of England.

NSS: What can you say about the absurdist dramas? What did that give you?

JH: For me, it’s a way of turning the world upside down, which funnily enough I had already received through Shakespeare’s fool and the Harlequin characters. It was a sort of absurdity that was used in order not to conclude that the world was absurd but, in fact, to conclude that it wasn’t absurd—that it had deep sense beneath what seemed like the absurdity of the surface. This touched me a lot, this idea that there were different layers going on and that characters had an inner life which they were actually allowed to concern themselves with. We have different layers within us, and art or performance gives us the opportunity to reflect on those.

NSS: When did the movement work come into your performance?

JH: I was very physical as a child, vented through gymnastics and sports, but I was uneasy with the competitive side; it ended when I was fourteen or fifteen. Then, when I was suddenly asked in a Shakespeare play to move a lot—by a choreographer, Liebe Klug—I felt completely at home moving and saying these Shakespearean lines.
            The drive that previously upset me in terms of sports competition was suddenly being harnessed towards a drive for individual and group excellence. So then it was a very obvious transition to be more and more physical in the theatre; I immediately joined a dance company, and that was the beginning of my dance career.

NSS: That’s a pretty big leap. How did that happen?

JH: Well, two things. The context was that I was living in Cambridge [UK] and there was a lot of experimentation going on in London. Peter Brook and Joan Littlewood were experimenting famously in the theatre, as the large professional theatre was experimenting with much more movement than it had done previously. Liebe Klug was also working with playwrights who wrote nonlinear stories and working with musicians…
            She was extremely at ease with what was then very exciting dynamics for a dance company, which was not a classic dance company by any means. We were doing pieces with live musicians on stage; we were singing; there was nonlinear text going on. This was in what you would call a contemporary dance company, but it was really much more based in theatre.

NSS: What was her dance background?

JH: It was, I think, somewhat touched by Laban, but more than that I don’t know. There was no sense of background; I had no idea what style meant. The first dance performance I ever saw was the first half of a piece I was in with her company. So I luckily came to it with an abundance of naiveté. What that meant was that I didn’t have to work through a series of styles in order to find my voice. Somehow the essence of what we were doing—straight from the theatre and asking myself the theatrical questions—was always there.

NSS: Asking yourself the theatrical questions—what does that mean?

JH: What’s going on in the theatre? What are you presenting? What are you taking the audience through? What kind of subject matter are you handling? How are you handling speed and time? How are you handling the space or décor? How are you handling epoch—like old or new? Those sorts of questions I remember being of my concern.

NSS: How did you continue to evolve into the contemporary dance community in London?

JH: That transition happened very simply. At the end of my time in Cambridge, somebody came down and said, “If you are thinking of doing this as a career”—which I had more than just thought of; after two weeks it was clear, and I was one hundred percent sure—“then you should go and get training.” There were two places in London, and the one that sounded most interesting was The Place. So I asked for an audition, and then went to study at The Place.
            And then suddenly, therefore, I was in the dance world. Luckily this was at a time when there was a whole range of people being taken in as first-year students: people who had done years of ballet, people who came from landscape architecture, someone who wrote his own plays. We were a motley crew of people with different thoughts on theatre, performance, and the performative act, be it on stage, be it in galleries, and so on. Those things didn’t seem like experiments to me; they seemed like people naturally finding places to do what they were imagining to do. It was only later that I realized that they seemed, in some eyes, to have broken certain boundaries. I didn’t have those boundaries to break; I just went straight in at nineteen and took everything I could get from the then great gamut of fabulous dancers who were in London at the time.

NSS: Another aspect of your work is your relationship to music—your own music making and your training in rhythm or drumming.

JH: At The Place, I studied with a great drummer named Jon Keliehor. I also sat by his side and played for many dance classes with him. He gave me a very rigorous, singular, and eternal system for playing, listening, and being with music—especially live music.

NSS: A system?

JH: It was a very simple rhythmic system. We basically studied all rhythms—a one rhythm, a two rhythm, a three rhythm, a four rhythm, right up to a nine rhythm—and we spent hours and hours doing this. That system has left me basically in no fear of playing with any group or any individual musician that I’ve subsequently met.

Although we weren’t dancing in Jon’s classes, we were learning that the music is not just a sound element. We just drummed with sticks and wood for two or three years. It was highly physical, and that meant that when I was dancing, I didn’t have the music so much in my ears to listen to but in my physical ears. What I’m talking about here is the way you listen when you’re moving, which is slightly different from the way you listen when you are sitting still or standing still.

NSS: Can you say something about that difference?

JH: Listening to music when moving, you can feel the vibrations coming through objects—the floor, your own body, their instruments—and it goes into your dancing automatically. It’s not two different streams: (1) you are moving, and (2) you are hearing. It is going somehow right into your torso, right into your bones.
            When you move, although you are disturbing the music by your own rhythms—the blood and the breathing—you are also actually dilating your body, and therefore you’re receiving the music more—maybe in a less analytical way, but you are receiving it more directly. Possibly that is why even when sitting down and listening to music, you very often wish to move in some way, as if moving is the only way you can hear or absorb certain elements of music.

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