conference paper / 2006

Dance, Mimesis and the Conscious Body

Barbara Sellers-Young

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Description

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 her clearest statements that pedagogy forms subjectivity. A mirror can train visual self-objectification; apprenticeship can cultivate incorporation into a tradition; video can democratize access while intensifying image-based learning. Sellers-Young's concern is not simply which method is best, but how each organizes attention and identity. The essay links dance training to larger questions about technology, mediation, cultural transmission, and the conscious body.

Metadata

Typeconference paper
Year2006
Era 2005-2010: Reflexivity, Mimesis, Contemplation, and Institutional Pedagogy i

2005-2010: Reflexivity, Mimesis, Contemplation, and Institutional Pedagogy

This period broadens and complicates the earlier positions. In belly dance studies, Sellers-Young sharpens the critique of appropriation, commercialization, and the imagined Arab body. She traces belly dance from the Chicago World’s Fair and “Little Egypt” through Arab American nightlife, second-wave feminism, goddess spirituality, and branded spectacle. Enjoyment is not denied, but it is placed inside unequal histories of representation.

In “Dance, Mimesis and the Conscious Body,” she identifies different pedagogical regimes: optical, somatic, and mediated. Mirror-based training produces self-objectification and visual abstraction; direct somatic apprenticeship produces incorporation into lineage and tradition; screen-based learning produces a more autonomous but more image-mediated learner. This is one of her clearest statements that pedagogy produces kinds of consciousness.

Her work on ethnographic perspective marks a decisive methodological turn. Reflexivity must include not only social identity but sensory structure, neurological pattern, and movement history. She names the genetic/structural, imaginal/social, and performance selves. This framework later becomes central to her somatic autoethnography.

The contemplation and neuroplasticity writings connect performance training to broader academic reform. Contemplative practice is framed as a third way of knowing, complementary to rational analysis and empirical observation. Neuroscience supplies a vocabulary for attention, plasticity, habit, and embodied change, though the underlying practical insight comes from performance and somatics.

Continuity: technique forms subjectivity.

Expansion: the performance studio becomes a model for higher education.

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AuthorBarbara Sellers-Young
EventInternational Federation for Theatre Research, Helsinki, Finland, August
Rolepresenter

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Analysis

Understanding this work

“Technique is both the animating aesthetic principle and the core ambivalence housed in every dance studio.” Barbara Sellers-Young begins from Judith Hamera’s sharply compressed formulation because it names the paradox that the paper will unfold with unusual clarity: technique disciplines, constrains, and demands replication, yet it is also the means by which dancers acquire power, agency, and aesthetic possibility. In “Dance, Mimesis and the Conscious Body,” that paradox is relocated from the familiar language of virtuosity into a deeper question about pedagogy and embodiment. What, Sellers-Young asks, is actually being transmitted when dance is taught? Not only movement phrases, not only style, not only cultural...

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