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 other words, is the phenomenology of intercultural training?
The paper begins from this omission with remarkable precision. Contemporary theorists, she writes, have attended to the body largely through “materialist readings of colonialism, race, gender, authenticity, cultural ownership, and the political empowerment of post-colonial subjects.” Yet “at the margins of their discussion” lies “the subjective knowledge or phenomenological experience of the performer,” the actor or dancer who must “kinesthetically integrate different, sometimes culturally opposing, aesthetic constructs to negotiate the boundary of self and other.” This phrasing matters. Interculturalism is not here a matter of juxtaposed forms or borrowed signs alone. It is a negotiation enacted in and through the performer’s body, where what counts as self, habit, technique, and even thought is tested by an alien pattern.
To make that claim, Sellers-Young chooses a case at once highly specific and broadly exemplary: the transmission of the Japanese performance principle jo-ha-kyu from Zeami and Noh through Eugenio Barba, Roberta Carreri, and the American acting teacher Sheldon Deckelbaum to an MFA acting student, Linda Rentner. The example is modest in scale, almost deliberately so. It does not offer a grand history of East-West encounter. Instead, it traces a single aesthetic construct through a chain of pedagogical bodies. That method allows Sellers-Young to show, concretely and without abstraction, how intercultural transfer occurs not as preservation but as transformation. The paper’s real subject is less jo-ha-kyu itself than what happens to a concept when it passes through different assumptions about the body, training, theatrical purpose, and personhood.
The silent labor of the intercultural body
The essay is framed by a tension between the euphoric rhetoric often attached to intercultural exchange and the bodily difficulty such exchange demands. Sellers-Young turns early to Rustom Bharucha’s memorable insistence that interculturalism is “an enormously taxing practice in the demands it makes on the body.” Bharucha’s account of the “incredible conflict that takes place within the body” as familiar “reflexes and rhythms, balance and co-ordination” are broken and reformed gives Sellers-Young a language for what she wants to foreground: not the visible result of hybrid performance, but the “labor of embodiment,” as she also notes via Virginie Magnat. The studio becomes a liminal site where bodies are asked to enter forms not native to them, and where that process is structured by pressures “so intimate that one tends to describe it as ‘home.’”
That last word, borrowed from Bharucha and taken up by Sellers-Young at the paper’s close, is decisive. The obstacle to intercultural transmission is not only ideological or institutional, though it is certainly that. It is also the performer’s own sedimented bodily familiarity: sensory habits, inherited training, tacit distinctions between inner and outer action, assumptions about whether movement follows thought or thought is cultivated through movement. The foreign is not merely outside the self; it is what dislodges what had seemed natural within the self.
This concern with the body as the site where culture becomes practical and difficult belongs deeply to Sellers-Young’s larger intellectual trajectory. Across her work, she insists that movement is neither decorative nor secondary but constitutive of consciousness and social life. Here that conviction appears in a sharply intercultural form. The borrowed technique is not simply adopted. It is filtered through the body’s prior organization. In this sense the paper advances a somatic revision of intercultural theatre theory before somatic reflexivity had become a widespread method in performance studies.
From hourglass to body: transmission as filtering
Sellers-Young borrows from Patrice Pavis the image of the intercultural “hourglass,” a narrowing passage through which theatrical material is filtered as it travels from one culture to another. She also cites Holledge and Tompkins’ insistence on the different “bodies” of performance—the body of the performer, the performing body, and the body of the audience—all culturally shaped and implicated in power. Yet her contribution is to make those models operational at the level of training. The performer, she suggests, occupies “the corporeal midpoint between self and other,” becoming “a container for an aesthetic ideal of the other” by embodying a technical vocabulary whose meanings have already been narrowed and translated.
The filters she identifies are concrete. First are teachers: direct transmitters from the source culture or indirect ones authorized by practice but not native to the originating tradition. Second are media images, which may circulate reductive or glamorized versions of a form—her offhand reference to The Karate Kid is not trivial but symptomatic of how much embodied expectation is preconditioned by pop-cultural shorthand. Third are the modeling pressures of the target culture: what its institutions reward, what its audiences expect, what pedagogical structures make legible. By the time a performer encounters a “foreign” technique, it has already been selected, reframed, and often simplified.
This is not an argument for purity, nor does Sellers-Young indulge the fantasy of recovering an untouched origin. Indeed, one of the essay’s strengths is that it neither romanticizes source traditions nor condemns transformation as failure. Rather, it asks what sort of transformation is taking place and why. Pavis’s warning that one may end with no “trace of the original matter” becomes, in Sellers-Young’s hands, less a lament than an analytic problem: how does one account for the invisible assumptions that re-author an imported form? The answer will lie not only in overt politics but in latent conceptions of the body.
Why American actors looked East
The paper situates its example within the long and recurrent attraction of Asian performance forms for American actor training, especially from the late 1960s onward. Sellers-Young sketches a familiar but still useful context: dissatisfaction with a narrowed, Strasberg-inflected Method had led many practitioners to seek alternatives that could restore precision, stillness, bodily discipline, and energetic range. Asian forms appeared as an antidote to psychologized naturalism. She quotes the recurrent praise of “dynamic intensity,” stillness “filled with tremendous motion,” and the ability to “move without moving.” Such formulations already reveal a Western desire: Asia as the place where the body has not been reduced to the servant of emotion.
But Sellers-Young is too careful to leave that desire uninterrogated. American actor training does not import Asian forms whole. It intersperses them with Stanislavski, Chekhov, Brecht, Meyerhold, and somatic disciplines such as Laban, Feldenkrais, and Alexander. The result is not a conversion from West to East but the production of “a hybrid integration” in which “each actor’s body is a hybrid” already crossing the East/West binary. This insight is crucial, because it prevents the essay from imagining two homogeneous civilizational blocs meeting intact. By the time jo-ha-kyu enters an American MFA program, it enters a body and an institution already layered with mixed lineages.
That layering is one reason the paper matters within Sellers-Young’s career. It anticipates her later insistence that technique forms consciousness and that pedagogies produce particular kinds of self-relation. The actor’s body here is not an empty vessel receiving Japanese rhythm. It is a historically trained body seeking in Japanese-derived practice a solution to specifically American theatrical problems.
Zeami’s principle: rhythm, breath, continuity
The paper’s central act of close historical attention is its reading of jo-ha-kyu in Zeami and Noh. Sellers-Young refuses the common reduction of the term to a simple tempo formula—slow, medium, fast—and reconstructs its larger dramaturgical and bodily significance. In Shugyoku tokka, Zeami writes that “all things in the universe, good and bad, large and small, with life and without, all partake of the process of jo, ha, and kyu.” Sellers-Young draws out what this means: jo-ha-kyu is not merely a compositional convenience but a principle that links the rhythm of nature, the structure of the play, the organization of a day’s performance, vocal phrasing, and bodily movement.
It is easy for Western readers to turn such claims into mystical generality. Sellers-Young avoids that by anchoring them in technique. Zeami’s writing on dance and chant ties jo-ha-kyu to reverence, form, and breath. In vocal production, “jo” is “hearing the pitch and gathering in the breath,” “ha” is “pushing out the breath,” and “kyu” is “the production of the voice itself.” Pleasure for the audience depends on the “fulfillment” of this process. This is already a strikingly different conception from one in which expression begins with inner emotion and then seeks external form. Here bodily organization and breath are not after-effects of mental intention; they are the very medium through which aesthetic coherence emerges.
Nomura Shiro’s description of jo-ha-kyu in movement extends the point. In walking, the first step prepares, the middle steps gather and accelerate, the final step culminates while preparing the next sequence. The energy of the action is “projected without being released”; new energy is simultaneously accumulated for the next phrase. Sellers-Young underscores that in this conception the action does not simply climax and end. It stores and transitions. Breath links one phrase to the next. The body does not discharge energy as an isolated unit; it modulates continuity.
That emphasis on continuity, accumulation, and bodily integration is perhaps the essay’s deepest understanding of Zeami. It is reinforced by Sellers-Young’s note—partly scholarly, partly experiential—that the challenge of jo-ha-kyu lies in the inhalation between movements, the initiation of the next “jo” in the poised interval after the previous exhalation. Her brief first-person footnote is significant. It does not displace scholarship with anecdote; rather, it quietly models the kind of embodied criticism the essay advocates. To understand jo-ha-kyu one must attend not only to textual definition but to the kinaesthetic difficulty of sustaining a phrase beyond obvious completion.
Sellers-Young also insists, importantly, that Zeami wrote within the hereditary iemoto system. His essays were not introductory manuals. They assumed embodied knowledge already transmitted through lineage and imitation. This historical reminder does more than provide context. It explains why intercultural transfer will necessarily alter the concept. Once removed from that system, jo-ha-kyu must be made explicit, compressed, translated into workshop exercises, and rendered intelligible to bodies trained otherwise. The problem is not that Westerners misunderstand a transparent original; it is that the original depended on tacit structures of training no short-term transmission can reproduce intact.
Barba: from body-mind cultivation to energetic opposition
The first major transformation in Sellers-Young’s lineage occurs with Eugenio Barba. Her treatment of Barba is measured but unmistakably critical. She places him in the history of European avant-garde theatre and theatre anthropology, where the search for “presence” and “scenic life” often depends on identifying pre-expressive principles thought to underlie different performance traditions. Barba’s attraction to jo-ha-kyu emerges from this search for energetic universals.
The exercise he takes from Azuma Katsuko is telling: the teacher physically restrains the student by the belt; the student presses into resistance, is suddenly released, moves rapidly to a fixed limit, then stops. Barba glosses jo-ha-kyu as “resistance, rupture, acceleration.” This is not an arbitrary mistranslation. It is a productive reinterpretation within Barba’s own theatrical agenda. The emphasis falls on oppositional tension, release, crescendo, and sudden stop. Jo-ha-kyu becomes a means for training the actor’s energy, for forging the “pre-expressive body” that can command the spectator’s attention before signification or character.
Sellers-Young recognizes the ingenuity of this adaptation, but she also shows what it omits. The Japanese principle is detached from its larger cosmology of nature, breath, reverence, continuity, and body-mind cultivation and is recast as an energetic mechanism serving a modernist project. Barba seeks, as she notes, a “transcultural physiology,” a universal level of performer presence “independently of traditional culture.” The move is characteristic of certain modernist appropriations of non-Western forms: cultural specificity is translated into a general theory of energy available for avant-garde innovation.
Her critique here is not simply that Barba universalizes. It is that his universalization depends on a particular European conception of the body: the actor’s body as “raw material for sign processing,” as Fischer-Lichte puts it in the passage Sellers-Young cites at length. The body is semiotized, organized, reformed into an instrument. Even when nature or pre-civilized vitality is invoked, the actor’s body remains an object of technical intervention. In this framework jo-ha-kyu serves not as a discipline of cultivation through which mind and body become increasingly integrated, but as a technique for magnifying stage effect.
The force of Sellers-Young’s reading lies in how she tracks the alteration through vocabulary. “Resistance, rupture, acceleration” preserves the triadic shape but changes its experiential logic. Resistance is externalized; rupture becomes the decisive moment; acceleration culminates in a stop. The subtle Noh insistence that the end of one phrase stores the beginning of another gives way to a more visibly dynamic model of scenic energy. The change is small in phrasing and large in ontology.
Deckelbaum: an American corrective
Sheldon Deckelbaum inherits jo-ha-kyu in a form already mediated by Odin Teatret training and then adapts it again for American actor training. Sellers-Young’s portrait of Deckelbaum is particularly nuanced because she shows how his use of jo-ha-kyu answers a local pedagogical problem. He is working in a United States acting culture still strongly marked by Strasberg’s emotionalism, and he wants to recover Stanislavski’s more fully psychophysical account of physical action. Jo-ha-kyu becomes, for him, a corrective rhythm: a way to give actors “conscious control over the composition and rhythm of their work.”
His own memory of learning the “Japanese walk” is significant for what it lacks. He recalls the physical alignment, the sense of moving against resistance, increased speed, suspension, and sustained action “longer in time than space,” but “no reference to Zeami or other explanation of jo-ha-kyu.” This is not presented as a deficiency of pedagogy alone. It demonstrates Sellers-Young’s larger point: what often travels most readily in intercultural workshops is a physicalized shorthand detached from the tradition’s underlying training assumptions.
Deckelbaum’s reformulation—“wind-up,” “release,” “follow-through”—renders the concept immediately accessible to American students. His baseball analogy and graphic diagrams are pedagogically astute. They also relocate jo-ha-kyu decisively. “Jo” is the gathering of potential energy in the opposite direction, “ha” its release toward action, “kyu” the sustaining follow-through. The notion becomes analytic, compositional, and functional within a theatre culture concerned with playable action, textual interpretation, and adaptable performance scale. It is integrated with Stanislavski, Meyerhold, and Chekhov rather than with Noh lineage or Japanese self-cultivation.
The paper does not condemn this relocation. Sellers-Young sees in Deckelbaum’s work a genuine effort to reconcile “the body as a container of emotions with the body as a universal sign.” That formulation is astute because it captures a transitional pedagogy. Deckelbaum stands between inherited American realism and imported body-based methods from Europe and Asia. He uses jo-ha-kyu to bridge them. In that sense, the concept’s transformation is not accidental but necessary to the receiving context. It solves a Western problem by being made Westernly usable.
Linda Rentner: useful distance from the source
The final stage in the lineage, Linda Rentner’s use of jo-ha-kyu, gives the paper its most revealing example of transformation. Rentner learns the principle not from Japanese theatre directly but from an American teacher who has already reframed it. Her account is admirably plain: jo-ha-kyu is “a method of scoring both text and physical actions by breaking them down into their static buildup of energy, their kinetic release of energy, and the sustainment of that energy leading into the next buildup.” Clear, practical, effective—and very far from Zeami’s world.
Sellers-Young carefully reconstructs Rentner’s process. She begins with familiar Stanislavskian script analysis—given circumstances, obstacles, conditioning forces—then divides the monologue into jo-ha-kyu segments rather than conventional beats. These segments can be nested within one another. She then explores the inner attitudes physically through something akin to Michael Chekhov’s psychological gesture; if the character’s objective is to “claw,” she experiments with clawing gestures shaped by jo-ha-kyu phrasing. Thus the process combines intellectual script reading, rhythmic segmentation, physical imagery, and final performative choice.
What interests Sellers-Young is not whether this works theatrically—it evidently does—but what it reveals about intercultural transmission. For Rentner, jo-ha-kyu is no longer a pervasive principle of cosmic rhythm, breath, and cultivated body-mind unity. It is an analytic tool for organizing text and action. Its body enters after analysis; the body is asked to realize structures first grasped mentally. Sellers-Young’s phrase is exact: this is “a static analysis—at least in terms of the body’s involvement in the initial analysis.” The concept has become a score.
This is perhaps the paper’s sharpest insight. Hybrid forms are not necessarily less rich than their sources; they are differently organized around different bodily epistemologies. Rentner’s use of jo-ha-kyu is inventive and productive, but it is productive within Cartesian assumptions in which text, thought, and body can be sequentially coordinated. That sequence is precisely what Zeami’s model, as Sellers-Young reads it, does not presume.
Same triad, different bodies
The essay’s most elegant comparative move comes when Sellers-Young simply places the three translated vocabularies side by side:
Barba: “resistance, rupture, acceleration” Deckelbaum: “gathering, release, follow-through” Rentner: “static build-up, kinetic release, and sustainment”
The simplicity of the comparison is deceptive. These are not trivial synonyms. They are evidence of divergent bodily imaginaries. “Resistance” is not “gathering”; “rupture” is not “release”; “acceleration” is not “sustainment.” Each set of terms implies a different relation between force, intention, continuity, and control. What remains common is the triadic energetic progression. What changes is what the body is imagined to be doing and what training is imagined to cultivate.
Here Sellers-Young introduces a distinction that deserves wider notice: the difference between manifest and latent culture. Intercultural analysis often attends to manifest elements—national signs, costume, race, visible style. But the more decisive transformations may occur at the latent level, where assumptions about embodiment are rarely named because they feel natural. Is the body a sign-system, an instrument, a disciplined unity, an archive of emotion, a mechanism for scenic presence? Does training begin in consciousness and move outward, or in form and move inward? These are not decorative philosophical questions appended to technique. They determine what a technique becomes when borrowed.
The performer’s body, in this account, is a site of epistemological conflict. Sellers-Young draws on Yuasa and Kasulis to characterize East Asian self-cultivation traditions as beginning “from the body or form,” training the mind through training the body, and conceiving mind-body not as a problem of relation between separate substances but as increasing integration. By contrast, dominant Western frameworks tend toward dualism: the body as assembly of parts, directed by the mind, understood empirically, deployed as material. The distinction is necessarily broad, and Sellers-Young handles it with more tact than dogmatism. Her claim is not that “Japan” and “the West” are timeless opposites. It is that the line of transmission under review reveals a practical clash between different habitual models of embodiment.
This is where the paper extends intercultural theory beyond questions of representation. The intercultural is not only the meeting of visible differences. It is the friction between ways of knowing through the body.
Against transparent borrowing
One of the essay’s implicit targets is the recurring modernist faith that bodily universals permit free artistic travel. Directors such as Barba and Brook, in different ways, often assume that beneath cultural elaboration lies a common body available for transcultural technical exchange. Sellers-Young does not deny bodily commonality. What she denies is the neutrality of bodily reception. A technique does not arrive in an empty physiology. It is reinterpreted through training systems, theatrical genealogies, sensory preferences, institutional demands, and what Bharucha calls the body’s sense of “home.”
This is why the paper’s conclusion is more radical than it first appears. Western theatre, Sellers-Young argues, may adopt Asian techniques without adopting the bodily worldview that made those techniques meaningful in their originating context. To reproduce not the form alone but its mode of cultivation would require “a revision of the conception of the body and its relationship to the cultural milieu of which performance is representative.” The phrase “cultural milieu” is important. Embodiment here is not just personal somatic patterning; it is the embodied organization of a culture.
That caution anticipates a great deal of Sellers-Young’s later work. She repeatedly resists the fantasy that movement vocabularies can be detached from the social, ritual, pedagogical, or ethical worlds that sustain them. Yet she is equally resistant to authenticity policing that would make transmission impossible. What matters is reflexive exactness about what has changed and why. “Looking East – Finding West” is therefore not a denunciation of hybridity. It is an argument for more honest accounts of hybridization.
A turning point in Sellers-Young’s thought
Within Sellers-Young’s own development, this paper occupies a revealing middle position. It retains the ethnographic attention to context and transmission that marked her earlier work on ritual and performance, but it turns decisively toward the performer’s internal process. The question is no longer only what a dance or theatre event does socially, but how technique is lived, translated, and transformed within training bodies. One can see here the emergence of concerns that later become central in her writing on somatics and pedagogy: the body as historical archive, technique as consciousness-forming, training as a mode of knowing rather than mere skill acquisition, and reflexivity as necessarily embodied.
The paper also exemplifies her resistance to simplistic East/West binaries even while she uses them strategically. The title itself, “Looking East – Finding West,” is not a slogan of discovery but a diagnosis of translation. What Western actors often find in Asian forms are answers to Western theatrical dissatisfactions. They look East in order to solve problems generated by American and European training traditions. That does not invalidate the encounter, but it means the imported principle is quickly enlisted in local projects. Hence jo-ha-kyu becomes, successively, a principle of Noh organization, an engine of pre-expressive energy, a corrective to Method-dominated training, and a script-scoring device.
What remains intellectually powerful in the essay is its insistence that this sequence must be understood from the inside out as well as from the outside in. Intercultural performance is not only a politics of representation or a history of influence. It is also a bodily negotiation in which techniques are accepted, resisted, misunderstood, reauthored, and made usable by living performers. The “silent pain” of that process is not incidental. It is where culture becomes somatic fact.
Why the essay endures
The continuing relevance of “Looking East – Finding West” lies in its refusal of two temptations that still structure discourse on intercultural performance. One temptation is celebratory universalism: the body as common ground, technique as freely available resource, hybridization as self-evident enrichment. The other is a purely external critique in which the politics of borrowing are analyzed without sustained attention to the embodied labor of those who borrow and are borrowed from. Sellers-Young charts a more difficult path. She keeps the politics in view while insisting that the performer’s phenomenological experience is not an optional supplement to theory but one of its necessary grounds.
Her chosen example of jo-ha-kyu shows just how much is at stake in what can appear a minor pedagogical matter. A principle of rhythm carries within it assumptions about time, continuity, breath, selfhood, training, and the relation of body to mind. Once that principle enters another culture, it can remain recognizably itself only by becoming something else. Sellers-Young does not lament that paradox; she anatomizes it.
In doing so, she enlarges the field’s understanding of interculturalism. The body is not simply where culture is inscribed, nor merely the material on which ideology works. It is where technical concepts are tested against tacit models of personhood. To study intercultural performance seriously, this essay suggests, one must attend to the ways performers “negotiate the past in the present,” and to the hidden assumptions under which that negotiation becomes possible at all.
The paper finally proposes a demanding standard for intercultural practice. Borrowing a technique is not the same as entering the cultivation system that produced it. To come closer to that system would require more than workshops, analogies, and compositional uses. It would require a reeducation of bodily thought itself. That is a daunting prospect, and Sellers-Young does not pretend it can be easily achieved. But by naming the problem with such clarity, she makes intercultural performance thinkable at a deeper level: not as the exchange of forms alone, but as the contested meeting of embodied epistemologies.
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