conference paper / 2001

Looking East – Finding West: The Actor, Interculturalism and the Body

Barbara Sellers-Young

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Description

This paper considers what happens when Western actors seek training through Asian performance and contemplative systems. Sellers-Young is interested in the actor's kinesthetic labor: the bodily work required to inhabit an unfamiliar aesthetic discipline without assuming that technique can be detached from culture. The title's movement from East to West signals that intercultural training often reveals as much about the borrower's assumptions as about the borrowed form.

The work sharpens her account of interculturalism by moving below representation into sensation, attention, and habit. It asks how performers translate concepts such as energy, breath, timing, and formal discipline into their own theatrical contexts. The result is neither simple appropriation critique nor uncritical enthusiasm. Sellers-Young frames intercultural actor training as a demanding field of transformation, where bodily learning must be accompanied by reflexive awareness of history and power.

Metadata

Typeconference paper
Year2001
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 Symposium: Japanese in the 21st Century; International Federation for Theatre Research, Edinburgh, Scotland and Sydney, Australia, July
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Analysis

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Barbara Sellers-Young’s “Looking East – Finding West: The Actor, Interculturalism and the Body” is a characteristically clarifying intervention into a field that, by the turn of the twenty-first century, had become both theoretically rich and methodologically uneven. Intercultural performance studies had already produced sophisticated debates about colonialism, appropriation, race, authenticity, and the politics of representation. Sellers-Young neither dismisses nor bypasses those concerns. Rather, she notices what they leave strangely underdescribed: the bodily event of transmission itself. What happens when a performer is asked to absorb a foreign discipline not as idea, image, or citation, but as rhythm, alignment, breath, timing, resistance, and kinaesthetic pattern? What, in...

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