Law and Arts: Part 3 of 3 – Dancing the Law
By Saskia Vermeylen – posted on 6 October 2023
Trance dance
The final instalment in my blogpost series about law and art focuses on the relationship between law and dance.
As I mentioned in my first blogpost on law and photography, rituals play an important role in the anthropological study of the law of the Ju/’hoan in Namibia. Unlike our Western legal system that is codified in written texts, the Ju/’hoansi’s legal culture can be found in !aia which is the moment the healer is in contact with the ancestors and their spirits. The spiritual power of the healers - n|om – is reached through dance. Richard Katz, Megan Biesele and Verna St Denis provide in Healing Makes our Hearts Happy an intricate account about the meaning of n|om; an experience, they caution, is difficult to understand or describe because it is an energy that exists beyond words and induces an enhanced state of consciousness (you can find a summary of the book in this article). In the same book, first-hand accounts of experienced healers centralise the importance of dance. For example, as Kinachau reflects: “You dance, dance, dance. The n|om lifts you in the belly and lifts you in the back … N|om makes you tremble, it’s hot.” Another healer, Kxao ≠Oah describes the feeling of n|om as: “In your backbone you feel a pointed something and it works its way up. The base of your spine is tingling, tingling, tingling, tingling. Then n|om makes your thoughts nothing in your head.”
The anthropologist Chris Low explores what happens with the body when participating in trance dances and you can read more about Low’s experience in the article ‘The Role of the Body in Kalahari San Healing Dancers’. According to Low the core of the trance dance consists of a series of techniques that embody the sensory skills of the healers that they have acquired by living as hunter gatherers and which they apply to stimulate feelings of ‘potency’ (n|om) in the body. Although I had the privilege to witness trance dances, unlike Low, I never participated as a dancer. However, it has always bothered me that I had to rely on second hand accounts when analysing the trance dances for their socio-legal significance in the San’s societal organisation and healing practices. Fortunately, the work of the anthropologist and dancer Sian Sullivan, has inspired me to study trance dances from an embodied perspective.
An embodied study of dance
In the article ‘On Dance and Difference: Bodies Movement and Experience in Khoesān Trance-Dancing Perception of a Raver’, Sullivan makes the point that to avoid essentialising and exoticising the ritualised dance practices, it is important to add an experiential aspect to the well-known ethnographic method of participant observation. Drawing upon her training and experience in different dance forms, Sullivan makes a compelling point that there is a universal ability to attain trance-like state through dance movements.
It was Sullivan’s article that inspired me to pick up the practice of 5 rhythms, a dance movement developed by Gabrielle Roth in the 1970s. It is a dance movement that is open, nonverbal, nonlinear, and a creative expression of a movement meditation. It incorporates elements of Roth’s interests in shamanism, healing, spirituality, and theatre. Roth conceptualised 5 rhythms not as rhythms in a musical sense but rather as experiential rhythms that are awakened the moment the body starts moving. The rhythms are danced in a sequence called a wave and as Zsofia Maurer explains in her article ‘The lived experience and transformation potential of 5 rhythms dancing meditation: an intuitive enquiry’ each of the rhythms are accompanied by a sound and physical movement and her summary of the different waves gives a good overview what these movements express:
Flowing represents a strong connection with the earth. Through moving the feet with big round movements, the body can connect to female energy.
Staccato is associated with masculine energy and is embodied through percussive movements with the hips.
Chaos signifies letting go the mind by relaxing head and neck muscles which helps with stopping a conscious thinking process through transcending masculine and female energies.
Lyrical relates to a playful movement and is associated with hand and fingertips. It symbolises surrounding to a soulful state of being whereby the dancer is being danced rather than consciously dancing.
Stillness embodies an inner state of being connected with breadth rather than outside movement.
The 5 movements share a similar dynamic field of energy with, for example, the San’s trance dance. Energy is available for the dancer to move into, through, or with the body and provides the basis for exploring the physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual aspects of the individual and the realm of the collective. But what interests me the most in the practice is the possibility to experience enhanced mind-body relations, an experiential awareness that is also noted by other dancers (see for example the article by Sullivan, and Doerte Weig’s article ‘Rhythms as cohesive forces: ritual, body, and senses in the 5 rhythms movement practice’).
This relates to wider reflections in feminist theories that the human body could be used more productively as a ‘site’ of reflection. In order to understand the relationship between body and mind, or nature and society, the body’s sensorial and communicative functioning must be explored from an embodied perspective. The body is not inseparable from other material and environmental flows. This is of particular importance for environmental studies including environmental law. As Rosemary Mwanza highlights in the paper Framing the normative role of the right to a healthy environment: thinking with internormativity, embodiment and emergence, environmental law “stops short of radically challenging the disregard for human embodiment and for human embeddedness in nature.” Environmental law is haunted by what Mwanza calls a disembodied ontology that obscures and constrains our corporeal existence by favouring reason over body.
I enquire that this embodied understanding of the relationship between law and the environment can be expanded and enhanced with dance. As Gabriel Klein and Sandra Noeth propose in the introduction of their edited collection Emerging bodies: the performance of worldmaking in dance and choreography dance as a medium of the body can generate new knowledge, it can constitute a world beyond language and rationality. While dance is usually seen as an aesthetic practice that is separate from other areas of society such as politics and law, Klein and Noeth make the point that politics also has a kinetic foundation which I argue can also be extended to law. Categories that define dance such as flow, rhythm, space, time, energy, and dynamics are also informing a legal order although they may not always be in synchrony. Therefore, dance can also be a medium through which to study in an embodied and sensual manner legal possibilities of the future.
Dance as a legal method
I had the opportunity to experiment further with this embodied understanding of the law through my participation in the arts project of video artist Jemma Woolmore These relations are forever. The project is part of Resonances which is the flagship SciArt programme of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC). The theme of the fourth edition is NaturArchy, a concept that is linked to Michel Serres’ idea of extending Rousseau’s social contract to nature (for more details about Serres and the natural contract see my chapter ‘Materiality and the ontological turn in the Anthropocene’ in the edited collection Environmental Law and governance for the Anthropocene by Louise Kotzé). NaturArchy aims to explore through artistic, scientific, and legal expressions how we can redefine our anthropocentric relationship with nature. Woolmore’s project consists of weaving together rituals that are performed by different scientists including my own dance ritual. The rituals represent an embodied reflection about the use of endocrine (hormone) disrupting chemicals (EDC) and how it impacts the environment and our bodies.
My ritual was curated as a 5 rhythm dance movement at Bitterfeld which is a water treatment site near Berlin where contaminated groundwater is cleaned. The dance practice followed the energy of the wave to experiment with rhythm, flow, site, time, and chemical elements the impact of EDCs on the body. The legal question that is explored through dance and movement is the legislative gap at the European Union to protect people from EDCs (more details about EDC can be found in ClientEarth’s report on 3 actions to protect people and wildlife from EDCs). Although the production of the ritual is still ongoing, I can already share some preliminary reflections how through the ritual of dance the human body became a site of legibility that has so far been ignored in environmental regulation.
Paula Kramer’s work on dance is specifically useful to link the dance experience to the introduction of new materialism in legal theory and more specifically environmental law (for more information about how Kramer theorises the linkages between movement and intermateriality see Suomenlinna//Gropius: Two contemplations on body, movement and intermateriality). This is part of a wider movement that questions the bounded view of the law and instead proposes that law should give more attention to, in the words of Margaret Davies, “the physical and factual dimension of human existence” (for more information about this work see Law Unlimited: Materialism, Pluralism, and Legal Theory).
Applying Kramer’s insights to my dance practice has allowed me to find alternative ways to think with and through the dance. As legal subjects we are not just autonomous entities but are intricately linked to (and I refer to Kramer’s words here) materials, power relations, historical contexts, textures, atmosphere, foods, plants, animals, smells and many others living and non-living entities that share time and space with us. 5 rhythms has allowed me to explore through the different kinetic movement of each wave that different energies were released that reflected other rhythms and temporalities than the site where I was dancing and the relationship that exists between the site and the treatment of contaminated water.
In my writing practice related to this project I am reflecting how (environmental) law regulates bodily movements, and I seek to expand on the work that has been done by Sean Mulcahy in the paper Dances with laws: from metaphor to methodology. Particularly the vision of Pierre Legendre (see the chapter ‘The dance of law’ in Peter Goodrich’s collection on Law and the unconscious: A Legendre reader) that law is created by a play of regulation which is inscribed and fixed in the body resonates with the movements that I have explored. But while most of the work that has been done in law and dance has focused on choreographed and professionally danced performances, my contribution to this field of study reflects on free movements and the enhanced relationship between mind and body through the release of kinetic energies. This diverts from the other studies analysed by Mulcahy that are inscribing legal procedures to choreographic exercises. Through my study of the San trance dances and my own practice of an unchoreographed dance movement, I am using the body as a site where new relations between law and the material context can be regenerated. Instead of perceiving the lack of regulation on EDCs as symptomatic for a legal deficit, by using the energy that is released through the dancing body new relationships between law and body emerges. Thresholds can be decided upon outside scientific experiments, they can also be intuitively explored through the movement of the body.
To conclude, dance is so much more than just a metaphor for a legal process, it is a practice that can create a space to think but above all feel the law. It transcends the mind and reason and allows us to journey back to the body and to think with and through the body about legal alternatives that can regulate with clarity of the mind and body a better future.
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Credits
Artist: Jemma Woolmore
Videographer: Jubal Battisti