conference paper / 2009

Neuroplasticity and Performance

Barbara Sellers-Young

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Description

This paper brings neuroscience into Sellers-Young's long-standing concern with training, habit, and transformation. Neuroplasticity provides a scientific vocabulary for something performance teachers know practically: repeated attention and embodied practice can reorganize perception, movement, and response. The performer is not fixed; the body-mind can be retrained through disciplined experience.

The work is significant because it links somatic pedagogy to broader debates about consciousness and learning. Sellers-Young is not using neuroscience to replace studio knowledge, but to clarify why breath work, imagery, repetition, contemplation, and movement exploration can have lasting effects. The paper reinforces a central claim across her career: technique is not merely expressive skill. It alters the conditions through which a person senses, thinks, acts, and relates to others.

Metadata

Typeconference paper
Year2009
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, Lisbon, Portugal, July
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Barbara Sellers-Young’s 2009 conference paper, “Neuroplasticity and Performance,” belongs to a particularly fertile moment in her career, when long-standing commitments to actor training, somatics, Asian-influenced performance pedagogy, and embodied cognition begin to converge with a newer vocabulary drawn from neuroscience and contemplative studies. The paper is not merely an argument for meditation in the arts classroom, nor simply a report on scientific findings that happen to support ideas performers already know in practice. Its more ambitious wager is that performance training has for decades cultivated a mode of knowing that higher education has too often failed to recognize: a disciplined, embodied, revisable attention through which...

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