Library

C

conference paper / 2007

Contemplation, Consciousness and the Academy

This paper argues that contemplative practice has a place in higher education because it cultivates forms of attention neglected by conventional academic training. Sellers-Young situates meditation, breath, movement, and reflective awareness as ways of knowing that complement rational analysis and empirical observation. The aim is not anti-intellectualism, but a more complete model of inquiry. The work extends her studio-base...

Consciousness and the Arts, Wales, May

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A

peer-reviewed article / 2006

Appropriation or Just Plain Fun: Belly Up from Cairo to Las Vegas

This article confronts one of the central ethical questions in Sellers-Young's belly dance scholarship: when does cross-cultural pleasure become appropriation? The essay follows belly dance through tourist entertainment, Las Vegas spectacle, commercial workshops, American fantasy, and global circulation. Its title captures the tension she refuses to simplify. The dance can be fun, pleasurable, and empowering, while also being...

Journal of International Diversity

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D

conference paper / 2006

Dance, Mimesis and the Conscious Body

This paper examines how dancers learn through mimesis, and what different modes of imitation do to consciousness. Sellers-Young distinguishes between optical learning through mirrors, embodied apprenticeship through close teacher-student transmission, and mediated learning through screens and recordings. Each method produces a different relation between self, image, authority, lineage, and bodily knowledge. The work is one of...

International Federation for Theatre Research, Helsinki, Finland, August

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I

conference paper / 2006

Identity, Corporeality, and Ethnographic Perspective

This paper marks a decisive methodological turn in Sellers-Young's work. She argues that ethnographic perspective must include not only social identity, such as gender, race, nationality, and class, but also the body's sensory structure, neurological patterns, movement history, and imaginal life. The ethnographer's body is not a transparent recording instrument; it is already trained, limited, and shaped by memory. The essay...

Congress on Research in Dance Conference, Arizona State University, November

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B

edited volume / 2005

Belly Dance: Orientalism, Transnationalism, and Harem Fantasy

For over a century belly dance has had enormous popularity, and by the 1970s and 1980s in the wake of the feminist movement, over a million women in the United States and many more thousands in Western Europe became devotees of this folk form. This set of essays presents an overview of solo improvised dance in the Middle East and in the West and provides insights into the continuance of orientalism within the global imaginati...

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B

conference paper / 2004

Breath, Thought, and Action: Wu Chi and Actor Training

This paper uses wu chi and related contemplative movement practices to explore the actor's passage from stillness into action. Sellers-Young is concerned with how performers cultivate readiness: a state of alert receptivity before gesture, speech, or character choice becomes fixed. Breath is the hinge between inward attention and outward performance. The work belongs to her sustained effort to integrate Asian-derived practice...

International Federation for Theatre Research Conference, St. Petersburg, Russia, May

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B

peer-reviewed article / 2002

Breath, Perception, and Action: The Body and Critical Thinking

This article extends Sellers-Young's somatic pedagogy into the theory of critical thinking. She argues that thought is not a purely verbal or abstract operation; it is shaped by breath, sensation, perception, habit, image, and action. Breath becomes a practical model for reflective inquiry: receiving experience, integrating it bodily and imaginatively, and responding with greater awareness. The essay is important because it b...

Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

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B

single-author monograph / 2001

Breathing, Movement, Exploration

This monograph presents Sellers-Young's practical movement pedagogy for actors. Its method joins anatomical awareness, breath, exploratory movement, imagery, improvisation, and performance application. The book's central premise is that actors develop presence not by imposing expression from the outside, but by learning how action emerges from an integrated body-mind. The work is crucial because it translates her philosophica...

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L

conference paper / 2001

Looking East – Finding West: The Actor, Interculturalism and the Body

This paper considers what happens when Western actors seek training through Asian performance and contemplative systems. Sellers-Young is interested in the actor's kinesthetic labor: the bodily work required to inhabit an unfamiliar aesthetic discipline without assuming that technique can be detached from culture. The title's movement from East to West signals that intercultural training often reveals as much about the borrow...

International Symposium: Japanese in the 21st Century; International Federation for Theatre Research, Edinburgh, Scotland and Sydney, Australia, July

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peer-reviewed article / 2001

“Nostalgia” or “Newness”: Nihon Buyō in the United States

This article examines Nihon buyo in the United States as a diasporic practice that is neither simple nostalgia nor simple innovation. Sellers-Young focuses on how Japanese classical dance carries lineage, hierarchy, etiquette, gesture, repetition, and teacher-student authority through the iemoto system, while also taking on new meaning for Japanese American communities shaped by migration, wartime incarceration, assimilation,...

Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory

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