Library

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chapter / 2000

The One Pointed Mind: Japanese Influence on Contemporary Actor Training in the United States

This chapter analyzes Japanese influence on contemporary American actor training, especially the movement from emotion-centered realism toward psychophysical integration. Sellers-Young traces how Zen, Zeami, Suzuki training, Viewpoints, and related practices helped American theatre artists rethink the actor as a body-mind continuum organized through attention, breath, stillness, energy, and form. The chapter is not a celebrat...

Japanese Theatre in its International Context

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chapter / 2000

The One Pointed Mind: Japanese Influence on Contemporary Actor Training in the United States

This version of Sellers-Young's Japanese-influence argument examines how American actor training absorbed and transformed concepts associated with Zen, Zeami, Suzuki, Stanislavski revision, and ensemble-based experimental theatre. The chapter's central concern is the actor's integrated attention: a state in which breath, image, body alignment, stillness, and action function together. Its importance lies in the care with which...

Japanese Theatre in its International Context

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conference paper / 1999

Cultural Icon – Harem Fantasy

In this paper, Sellers-Young examines the harem as a cultural icon that shaped Western reception of belly dance. The subject is not only historical misrepresentation but the power of fantasy to organize what spectators think they are seeing. The harem image condenses erotic availability, confinement, mystery, female sensuality, and imperial imagination, and it helped make Middle Eastern dance legible to Western audiences thro...

Congress on Research in Dance Conference, Pomona, California, December

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keynote address / 1999

Ethnic and Hybrid: Dance and the Cultural Image

This keynote addresses the problem of ethnic and hybrid dance under conditions of cultural circulation. Sellers-Young asks how dances come to stand for cultural identity, how images of "tradition" are produced, and how hybrid forms unsettle the boundary between preservation and invention. The work is concerned less with policing authenticity than with understanding who has the authority to name a dance, represent a culture, a...

ICHPERD World Congress, Cairo, Egypt, July

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conference paper / 1999

Exploration, Breath and Imagery: A Unifying Framework for Movement Training

This paper formulates one of Sellers-Young's clearest pedagogical models for performer training: exploration, breath, and imagery. The three terms name more than class exercises. Exploration shifts the performer from correction to inquiry; breath links physiology, attention, feeling, and action; imagery organizes movement through sensory and metaphorical structures stored in the body. The work is a bridge between her ethnogra...

Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Toronto, Canada, July

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peer-reviewed article / 1999

Technique and the Embodied Actor

This article develops Sellers-Young's account of acting technique as a producer of consciousness rather than a neutral method for achieving stage effects. Technique is understood as a disciplined way of organizing attention, sensation, breath, image, and action. The embodied actor is not a mind using a body as an instrument, but a trained organism whose perception and response can be reshaped through practice. The article mat...

Theatre Research International

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conference paper / 1997

Shi No Bara: A Transnational Dialogue

This paper uses the Plastic Rose Project, a 1995 exchange between UC Davis and Kinki University, to examine intercultural theatre as a practical test of perception. Both institutions staged Shogo Ohta's Shi No Bara, then performed for one another's audiences. Sellers-Young treats the project as more than cultural display: it becomes a rehearsal laboratory in which students encounter the limits of their own assumptions about r...

International Federation of Theatre Research, Puebla, Mexico, July

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single-author monograph / 1993

Teaching Personality with Gracefulness: The Transmission of Japanese Cultural Values Through Traditional Dance Theatre

This book includes both a description and a discussion of the methods used by Kanriye Fujima, a member of the Fujima school of Japan, to teach Nihon Buyon to primarily Japanese-Americans. Sellers-Young discusses Fujima's life as a teacher in three Pacific Northwest communities, providing an explanation of her teaching processes and contexts of performances. Incorporating the themes and images associated with the pieces, Selle...

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peer-reviewed article / 1992

Raks El Sharki: Transculturation of a Performance Form

This article is a foundational statement of Sellers-Young's approach to belly dance as a transnational and mediated form. She argues that American "belly dancing" is not simply Raks el Sharki transplanted from North Africa and the Middle East. It is a new cultural formation produced through Orientalist fantasy, world's fair spectacle, burlesque, Middle Eastern restaurant culture, second-wave feminism, body culture, and improv...

Journal of Popular Culture

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conference paper / 1987

Theatrical Aspects of the Zar

In this conference paper, Sellers-Young analyzes the zar in Yambio, Sudan as ritual theatre: a structured performance through which private distress is made visible, shared, and ritually managed. The essay focuses on a possession ceremony for Saida, an Arab woman whose illness is linked to infertility, displacement, and marital pressure. Through music, trance, costume, sacrifice, role-playing, and feasting, the ritual turns a...

American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, November

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