chapter / 2020
Three somatic processes to voice through movement: Breath, exploration, imagery
Barbara Sellers-Young
Description
This chapter revisits Sellers-Young's core somatic triad - breath, exploration, and imagery - through the problem of voice. Voice is treated not simply as sound production, but as embodied expression emerging from the whole moving person. Breath grounds vocal presence; exploration opens habitual patterns; imagery gives sensation and language an organizing force.
The chapter updates her earlier pedagogy through contemporary embodied cognition and enactive perspectives. It shows the continuity of her method across decades while refining its theoretical frame: mind, voice, and action arise through body-environment relation. For performers, the practical implication is that voice training cannot be separated from posture, sensation, memory, metaphor, and movement. The work is a concise late statement of Sellers-Young's performer-centered philosophy.
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Barbara Sellers-Young’s chapter “Three somatic processes to voice through movement: Breath, exploration, imagery” begins not with theory but with an artistic difficulty. In rehearsal for Voices of the Disappeared, she is handed a script recounting “a Guatemalan woman’s experience of losing her oldest child” and asked to combine those words with already-set choreography. The attempt, she writes, was “only minimally successful,” yet the partial failure proved intellectually generative. It revealed that in dance theatre “the vocal life of the dancer was as significant as their movement technique.” From that recognition emerges the chapter’s governing question: “What is the process of training that integrates voice and...