Library

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chapter / 2016

Men and the Happiness Dance

This chapter examines male participation in belly dance and related social dance forms through the idea of the "happiness dance." Sellers-Young challenges the assumption that the dance belongs naturally or exclusively to women. By attending to figures such as Ibrahim Farrah, Mahmoud Reda, Tito Seif, and John Compton, she shows that masculinity in the form is historically and contextually produced. The chapter is valuable beca...

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity

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handbook / 2016

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity brings together scholars from across the globe in an investigation of what it means to define oneself in an ethnic category and how this category is performed and represented by dance as an ethnicity. Newly-commissioned for the volume, the chapters of the book place a reflective lens on dance and its context to examine the role of dance as performed embodiment of the historical momen...

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conference paper / 2016

Wandering Deer Trails

This work returns to Sellers-Young's rural Oregon childhood as a formative somatic ground. Wandering deer trails becomes more than memory; it is an image for a way of knowing through quiet attention, nonverbal orientation, ecological intimacy, and bodily listening. The landscape is not treated as pastoral decoration, but as an early training in sensing relation before formal dance study. The piece is important for understandi...

CORD/SDHS Conference, Pomona, California

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peer-reviewed article / 2015

Edward Said and Tahia Carioca: Performing from a Place of Exile or a Place of Home

This article places Edward Said's reflections on Tahia Carioca in dialogue with Sellers-Young's own analysis of Egyptian dance aesthetics. Carioca becomes more than a celebrated performer; she is a figure through whom exile, home, restraint, musicality, and cultural memory can be understood. Sellers-Young uses Said to counter Western visual habits that read belly dance primarily through display and erotic excess. The article...

The International Journal of Arts Theory and History

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peer-reviewed article / 2014

Masculine or Feminine—Ancient or Contemporary: Raqs Sharqi and a World of Converged Images

This article challenges two persistent assumptions about Raqs Sharqi: that it is naturally feminine and that it can be understood as either ancient tradition or modern spectacle. Sellers-Young instead presents the form as a convergence of images, histories, gender performances, media, nationalist projects, and transnational fantasies. Masculinity and femininity are not embedded in movement once and for all; they are produced...

the world of music (new series)

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edited volume / 2013

Belly Dance Around the World: New Communities, Performance and Identity

This edited volume gathers scholarship on belly dance as a transnational practice shaped by new communities, performance contexts, and identities. Sellers-Young's contribution as editor is conceptual as well as organizational: the volume frames belly dance as a global choreoscape rather than as a single exoticized form. It asks how the dance is remade through diaspora, nationalism, feminism, tourism, media, spirituality, and...

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edited volume / 2013

Embodied Consciousness: Performance Technologies

This volume of essays combines research from neuroscience, consciousness studies, performer training systems, modes of creating a staged narrative, Asian aesthetics, and post-modern theories of performance in an examination of the relationship between consciousness and performance. Written by actors, directors, dancers, historians and theorists, the essays participate in the paradigm shift in the humanities and the arts from...

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introduction / 2013

Introduction

This introduction frames embodied consciousness as a central problem for performance studies. Sellers-Young presents the body not as an instrument controlled by the mind, but as the ground through which perception, thought, action, and performance emerge. The introduction situates performance technologies broadly: training systems, contemplative practices, movement vocabularies, and media all shape how performers know and act...

Embodied Consciousness: Performance Technologies

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chapter / 2013

Motion in Stillness — Stillness in Motion: Contemplative Practice in the Performing Arts

This chapter examines contemplative practice in the performing arts through the paired ideas of motion in stillness and stillness in motion. Sellers-Young is interested in the performer's capacity to sustain alert presence: a quiet, receptive awareness that remains active even when the body appears still, and a centered stillness that can remain present inside movement. The chapter refines her long engagement with Asian conte...

Embodied Consciousness: Performance Technologies

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conference paper / 2012

Moving Communities: The Globalization of Belly Dance

This paper analyzes belly dance as a global field of moving communities rather than a single stable tradition. Sellers-Young traces how the form circulates through festivals, workshops, diaspora venues, tourism, digital media, feminist spirituality, fusion styles, and commercial entertainment. The central question is how communities form around a dance whose meanings are already layered by Orientalism, pleasure, identity, and...

International Conference for Arts and Society, Liverpool, England, July

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