Talking Law and Performance with Sara Ramshaw and Julie Lassonde
By Sean Mulcahy
This post can also be read at the Canadian Network of Law & Humanities website: cnlh.ubc.ca
I recently had the pleasure of participating in the Visiting Scholars Program at the Peter A. Allard School of Law in the University of British Columbia. During my visit, I was able to attend and present at the Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities (ASLCH), work on an article (currently under consideration) on labour unions and human rights in Australia, and meet with the City of Vancouver 2SLGBTQ+ Advisory Committee to discuss research and perspectives on LGBTIQA+ inclusion in local government, which I have published a blog post on here.
The visit also included an interview with Canadian law and humanities scholar-practitioners Sara Ramshaw and Julie Lassonde. The interview was conducted as part of my Performing Law podcast series, featuring interviews with practitioners and scholars working in the intersections of law and performance and drawing from my doctoral research on legal performance. The podcast series is kindly supported by the Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama, and Performance Studies through the 2021 Research Support Scheme.
Sara is a legal scholar at the University of Victoria who has focussed on jazz improvisation as a metaphor for justice. I first met Sara when I was presenting a paper on silence as part of her stream on listening at the Critical Legal Conference. The paper, which would go on to be published in the Canadian Journal of Law and Society, was heavily influenced by her pioneering work exploring the relation between music and law, including her seminal piece, Justice as Improvisation.
Latterly, she has worked on dance improvisation as a mode of embodied research into law through collaboration with Julie. Julie is an independent artist, lawyer, and mediator who has developed dance practice as a way of exploring the relationship between law and the body. She completed her Master of Laws at the University of Victoria on the topic of performing law and has gone on to establish a body of performance and installation work that draws from her legal practice. I had the pleasure of publishing a paper of hers reflecting on her performance practice as part of a special issue on Performing Theatrical Jurisprudence in the journal Law Text Culture.
In speaking of her dual practice in art and law, Julie observes that “I always try to block time for the art part, which is always the most difficult to maintain”, but that it can be a “coming out” to tell artists she does law or lawyers that she does art. For me, this carried a lot of resonance as I struggle to keep up my artistic practice within the confines of legal academia.
The interview explores how their collaboration came about through a mutual interest in improvisation and the connections between art and law. As Julie remarks, “it is pretty rare that people are serious about this interdisciplinary work.” Both were at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law, which is well-known for its concentration of law and humanities scholarship and pedagogy, though Sara joined the faculty after Julie had completed her Masters there. Once Sara reached out, they began a collaboration and Julie remarked that “I felt understood” because the collaboration wasn’t built on a “superficial appreciation” but a serious and critical engagement with the artistic practice of improvisation.
They both reflected on the benefits of exploring law through arts-based practices. For Julie, exploring law through the body “produces unexpected discoveries”, “makes you understand a different dimension of law”, and “reveals norms that are at play in our interactions.” For Sara, artistic practices can facilitate lawyers and legal scholars listening and responding in a deeper way, as listening is “a skill that can be honed” and taught by improvising artists to legal practitioners and scholars “because they have thought about it a lot more, in a lot more depth, than lawyers.”
As Sara concludes, “law is a creative force – we know that – but it’s often pushed down or denied that law can be creative.” What law and humanities scholarship and practice can do is push back against those forces that seek to deny the creativity of law, but also to go further by exploring law through creative practice such as improvisation. As Sara says, “creativity in law is really needed for justice to come about.”
Their work, which they reflect on in the interview, parallels my own interest in dance, performance, and the theatricality of legal processes surrounding human rights and law-making. It was a wonderful opportunity to (re-)engage with them during my visit and to reconnect with the work on law and humanities in Canada. What I hope is that the interview – like others in the series – can bring about further cross-continental conversations and collaborations on creative or arts-based approaches to law.
I am very grateful to Julen Etxabe of the University of British Columbia and the Canadian Network of Law and Humanities for facilitating this Visiting Scholarship. The Visiting Scholars Program enables visiting faculty and scholars from around the world to exchange ideas and research and create new and ongoing international research collaborations. You can find more information about the Program here.
The paper presented at the ASLCH Annual Conference has also now been published as ‘Mournful mothers and damaged damsels: Are we really listening to women during parliamentary human rights scrutiny?’ in the journal Social and Legal Studies. The paper draws from Sara’s work on listening practices in law, as well as other critical cultural legal scholarship on listening, to explore the listening practices of parliamentary human rights scrutiny committees in Australia – and the parliamentarians that sit on them – and how their listening both is affected by and perpetuates gendered stereotypes of women, which in turn influences not only who is heard but how they are heard and responded to.
You can listen to the full interview with Sara and Julia here.
Dr Sean Mulcahy is a researcher based at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health & Society at La Trobe University with a focus on law and performance.
This post can also be read at the Canadian Network of Law & Humanities website: cnlh.ubc.ca