peer-reviewed article / 2018
Image, imagination and the social imaginary: Solo improvisational dances of North Africa and the Middle East
Barbara Sellers-Young
Description
This article analyzes solo improvisational dances of North Africa and the Middle East through image, imagination, and the social imaginary. Sellers-Young argues that belly dance is shaped not only by steps and musical structures, but by circulating images of gender, sensuality, ethnicity, spirituality, and cultural otherness. Improvisation becomes the field where dancers negotiate between inherited movement and imagined possibility.
The work is a mature theoretical statement because it connects embodied practice to collective fantasy without reducing dance to fantasy alone. Images can distort, but they also animate desire, memory, and self-fashioning. Sellers-Young shows how dancers work inside social imaginaries: sometimes reproducing Orientalist codes, sometimes revising them, sometimes using them for healing, community, or artistic invention. The article clarifies how movement makes cultural imagination tangible.
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Analysis
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Barbara Sellers-Young’s 2018 essay undertakes a difficult but necessary task: to think the globally circulating phenomenon called “belly dance” without either surrendering it to Orientalist fantasy or rescuing it by a false appeal to untouched authenticity. The article’s force lies in the way it refuses that familiar opposition. What it offers instead is an account of solo improvisational dances of North Africa and the Middle East as forms that have always been socially embedded, musically responsive, and locally meaningful, but that now live within a dense modern field of images—painted, written, filmed, advertised, staged, digitized—through which dancers and audiences alike imagine the dance...