workshop paper or notes / 2008

Delilah Hawaii Workshop

Barbara Sellers-Young

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Description

These workshop materials document Sellers-Young's engagement with Delilah's ecofeminist and ritualized belly dance practice in Hawai'i. The work centers on dance as an embodied relation with nature, not a performance placed in front of nature as scenery. Delilah's practice draws together belly dance, feminist spirituality, myth, healing, Delsartean expression, and ecological awareness.

For the archive, the materials matter because they show Sellers-Young studying a practitioner whose work reframes sensual movement as environmental participation. The body becomes a site where land, myth, gender, and healing are explored kinesthetically. This emphasis anticipates Sellers-Young's later sustainability writing: ecological consciousness is not only a matter of policy or representation, but of altered bodily relation. The workshop also reveals her interest in how dance communities create alternative spiritual and environmental imaginaries.

Metadata

Typeworkshop paper or notes
Year2008
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
Rolepresenter/author

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Analysis

Understanding this work

Barbara Sellers-Young’s workshop essay on Delilah is, on its face, a portrait of a particular dancer-teacher and a particular pedagogical milieu: women gathered at Kalani on the Big Island of Hawai‘i, moving in circles, practicing “Birthing and Reclaiming Dance,” entering a retreat designed as both somatic training and spiritual withdrawal. Yet the piece does more than document a workshop or celebrate a charismatic artist. It makes visible a historically specific American formation in belly dance culture—one in which feminist self-making, goddess spirituality, eco-consciousness, bodily pedagogy, and public activism converged—and it tests, through Delilah’s practice, what belly dance can become when it is...

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