Library

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chapter / 2020

Three somatic processes to voice through movement: Breath, exploration, imagery

This chapter revisits Sellers-Young's core somatic triad - breath, exploration, and imagery - through the problem of voice. Voice is treated not simply as sound production, but as embodied expression emerging from the whole moving person. Breath grounds vocal presence; exploration opens habitual patterns; imagery gives sensation and language an organizing force. The chapter updates her earlier pedagogy through contemporary em...

Somatic Voices in Performance Research and Beyond

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I

chapter / 2019

Improvising Happiness: Belly Dance’s Evolution through Improvisation

This chapter places improvisation at the center of belly dance's historical evolution. Sellers-Young argues that the dance develops by negotiating between known vocabularies and changing social conditions: weddings, family gatherings, restaurants, festivals, feminist communities, fusion scenes, and global digital circulation. Improvisation is not pure freedom. It is responsive action inside shared musical, social, and ethical...

The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Dance

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I

peer-reviewed article / 2018

Image, imagination and the social imaginary: Solo improvisational dances of North Africa and the Middle East

This article analyzes solo improvisational dances of North Africa and the Middle East through image, imagination, and the social imaginary. Sellers-Young argues that belly dance is shaped not only by steps and musical structures, but by circulating images of gender, sensuality, ethnicity, spirituality, and cultural otherness. Improvisation becomes the field where dancers negotiate between inherited movement and imagined possi...

Dance, Movement & Spiritualities

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chapter / 2018

Narrative Futures: Community, Technology and Globalization

A far-reaching and engaging overview of the role of narrative in dance and theatre performance, bringing together chapters written by an international range of scholars and subsequently creating a critical dialogue for approaching this fundamental topic within performance studies. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples of a variety of different performance genres, the book will provide a method for exploring the cont...

Narrative in Performance

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edited volume / 2018

Narrative in Performance

A far-reaching and engaging overview of the role of narrative in dance and theatre performance, bringing together chapters written by an international range of scholars and subsequently creating a critical dialogue for approaching this fundamental topic within performance studies. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples of a variety of different performance genres, the book will provide a method for exploring the cont...

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T

chapter / 2018

The Zar: Enactment of Social Drama in the Southern Sudan

This later chapter revisits the zar in southern Sudan with a more developed vocabulary of social drama, gendered agency, and embodied enactment. Sellers-Young again treats the ritual as a process that transforms personal distress into public performance, but the later framing gives greater attention to how women use ritual to negotiate vulnerability within patriarchal and ethnically divided settings. The chapter strengthens a...

Narrative in Performance

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co-authored textbook / 2017

Movement: Onstage and Off

Movement: Onstage and Off is the complete guide for actors to the most effective techniques for developing a fully expressive body. It is a comprehensive compilation of established fundamentals, a handbook for movement centered personal growth and a guide to helping actors and teachers make informed decisions for advanced study. This book includes: fundamental healing/conditioning processes essential techniques required for v...

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single-author monograph / 2016

Belly Dance, Pilgrimage and Identity

This book examines the globalization of belly dance and the distinct dancing communities that have evolved from it. The history of belly dance has taken place within the global flow of sojourners, immigrants, entrepreneurs, and tourists from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. In some cases, the dance is transferred to new communities within the gender normative structure of its original location in North Africa and t...

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D

peer-reviewed article / 2016

Dancing through myself: Memory, identity, spirituality

This article is a major autoethnographic statement in which Sellers-Young examines how memory, identity, and spirituality are formed through dance. The title signals the method: she does not write about dance from outside herself, but through the movement histories that have shaped her perception. Belly dance, Azande dance, Japanese dance, childhood landscape, religious formation, and personal memory become layered sources of...

Dance, Movement & Spiritualities

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E

chapter / 2016

Egypt: Place of Pilgrimage, Place of Home

This chapter reflects on Egypt as both a place of pilgrimage and a place of home within Sellers-Young's long relationship to belly dance. The chapter moves between travel, memory, dance analysis, and cultural reflection, showing how Egypt complicated early American fantasies of belly dance by presenting the form within layered histories, social worlds, music, nationalism, and everyday life. The work is important because it tu...

Belly Dance, Pilgrimage and Identity

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