peer-reviewed article / 2020

Oregon’s Sanctuary Stage: Giving Voice to the Voiceless

Barbara Sellers-Young

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Description

This article analyzes Sanctuary Stage in Oregon as a community performance process that creates public space for marginalized voices. Sellers-Young emphasizes story circles, trust-building, collaborative script development, performance, and dialogue. Sanctuary is not only a theme; it is a method for moving private memory into public recognition.

The work extends her theory of performance as social redress into civic life. Rather than representing communities from the outside, Sanctuary Stage invites participants to help shape the terms of representation. The stage becomes a threshold where micro-communities can articulate experience, encounter audiences, and reshape local conversation. The article is part of Sellers-Young's broader movement toward arts, community, and sustainability, showing how embodied performance can cultivate recognition without pretending to solve structural inequity by itself.

Metadata

Typepeer-reviewed article
Year2020
Era 2018-2020: Improvisation, Social Imaginaries, Sanctuary, and Refined Somatics i

2018-2020: Improvisation, Social Imaginaries, Sanctuary, and Refined Somatics

The 2018 and 2019 belly dance works make improvisation the central concept. Improvisation mediates between known and unknown, inheritance and invention, local social regulation and global self-fashioning. It is neither pure freedom nor mere repetition. In community settings it produces relational happiness; in global modernity it becomes a means of healing, spirituality, feminist revision, gender experimentation, and hybrid artistry. Yet it remains historically burdened by Orientalism and appropriation.

The renewed zar work returns to early themes with more mature vocabulary: ritual performance as social drama, women’s agency, and embodied enactment. The Sanctuary Stage article extends performance-as-sanctuary into civic life. Marginalized micro-communities use theatre to transform private memory into public dialogue through trust, story circles, collaborative creation, and performance.

The 2020 somatic-processes essay revisits exploration, breath, and imagery in the language of embodied cognition and enaction. The core pedagogy remains stable, but its theoretical frame is updated: mind emerges through body-environment action, and performer training applies this insight concretely.

Continuity: performance reorganizes social relations.

Expansion: sanctuary and somatics become linked through voice, community, and civic recognition.

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AuthorBarbara Sellers-Young
JournalThe International Journal of Social, Political, and Community Agendas in the Arts
Pages31-38
DOI10.18848/2326-9960/CGP/v15i01/31-38
ISSN2326-9960; 2327-2104
Roleprimary author

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Analysis

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Barbara Sellers-Young’s “Oregon’s Sanctuary Stage: Giving Voice to the Voiceless” belongs to a significant later phase of her work in which the arts are understood less as objects of interpretation than as procedures for reorganizing civic life. The article is brief, but its implications are larger than its length might suggest. It asks what theatre becomes when it is not primarily a site for the transmission of dramatic literature, nor even simply a forum for political messaging, but a carefully structured environment in which communities can come to voice. In this account, the stage is neither neutral platform nor symbolic public square in the abstract...

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