conference paper / 2004

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

Barbara Sellers-Young

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Description

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 practices into actor training without reducing them to exotic exercises. Wu chi offers a way to think about potential, balance, and energetic organization, but its theatrical value depends on disciplined translation. For Sellers-Young, the practice helps actors discover that action is not simply produced by intention; it emerges from a whole bodily field of perception, breath, gravity, and image. The paper refines her practical vocabulary for psychophysical performance.

Metadata

Typeconference paper
Year2004
Era 2000-2004: Japanese Influence, Body-Mind Integration, and Critical Thinking i

2000-2004: Japanese Influence, Body-Mind Integration, and Critical Thinking

The Japanese performance writings deepen her theory of embodied transmission. Nihon buyo in America is not merely nostalgic heritage; it is a site where diaspora, incarceration memory, gendered discipline, teacher-student hierarchy, and Japanese American identity are bodily negotiated. The iemoto system preserves continuity while enabling new subjectivities across generations.

At the same time, her work on Japanese influence in American actor training reframes Zen, Zeami, Suzuki training, and related practices as answers to a crisis in Method-dominated acting pedagogy. The “one pointed mind” integrates breath, stillness, concentration, inner image, outer form, and action.

Her educational writings extend somatics beyond performance. Breath, perception, and action become elements of critical thinking. “Feel, fuse, and follow” turns breath into a practical model of reflection: receiving, integrating, and responding. She now argues explicitly that thought is bodily, that education should cultivate embodied attention, and that critical inquiry can be deepened through movement.

Continuity: bodily training changes consciousness.

Revision: Asian-derived practices are treated less as exotic resources than as disciplined modes of attention requiring careful translation.

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AuthorBarbara Sellers-Young
EventInternational Federation for Theatre Research Conference, St. Petersburg, Russia, May
Rolepresenter

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In “Breath, Thought, and Action: the Wu Chi of Actor Training,” Barbara Sellers-Young proposes a deceptively simple reordering of theatrical pedagogy. Before the actor can shape action, intention, or character, the actor must learn to sense. That proposition does not reject craft, structure, or discipline; it relocates their basis. Instead of beginning with externally visible behavior, psychological motivation treated as mental content, or a repertory of technical effects, Sellers-Young starts from minute psychophysical events: breath, subtle sensation, shifts of tone, internal pressure, the body’s changing relation to gravity, touch, and attention. The actor, in her account, is not first a body carrying out decisions made...

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