The Choreography of Consent: Experiments in Dance/Law research

The Choreography of Consent Network brings together practitioners and scholars from dance and law to develop innovative dance/law research methods that explore the movement of consent. The Network addresses the growing emphasis on the embodied dimensions of the law (Smith 2021; Perry-Kerris 2021) and the developing recognition of the refined understanding of movement that dance can bring to legal studies.

A key aim is to identify how dance-based research can enrich understandings of consent within legal frameworks; and in turn, how contemporary legal research can enrich dance-embedded understandings of consent.

Consent has undergone much legal and cultural change in recent years, linked to the development of diverse and sometimes conflicting conceptualisations. Rather than trying to stabilise consent in this shifting area, the Choreography of Consent Network takes the movements of consent as its catalyst, using dance and law to interrogate how practitioners, participants and researchers move within and through diverse consent processes in areas where consent can now be presumed (tissue donation) or framed as affirmative and enthusiastic (context of sexuality).

Dance offers a powerful lens for exploring the impact of these reforms on different users. Contact improvisation methods, for example, can assist in producing tangible knowledge in law's understanding of 'dynamic consent', which demands qualities of responsivity and immediacy (Kaye 2015). Somatic practices may illuminate the affective experience of deemed consent, exemplified by the Organ Donation Act 2019 which now uses stillness (assent) to confirm consent, reversing the familiar pattern of active movement as a way of indicating opting in.

Such profound shifts in the choreography of consent require a dance-based analysis of the affective impact of these forms.

Led by Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (CSM) with the School of Law at the University of Leeds (UoL) and project partners People Dancing - Foundation for Community Dance, and Independent Dance, London, this network brings together UK and international scholars with specialisms in dance improvisation, choreographic practice, somatic practice, socio-legal study, legal ethnography, anthropology and legal materiality to experiment with innovative interdisciplinary research methods that experiment with the capacity of dance/law collaboration to address concrete world problems.

Over four events, the Network will map existing dance/law expertise and methods; exchange and develop new collaborative dance/law methods; test these approaches focusing on the practice of consent; and identify future applications for these innovative methods. A final public event will showcase the Network's outputs and locate them in the arts and humanities research context as well as launching and introducing the project's digital legacy to researchers and practitioners beyond the Network.

Each event will involve dance workshops, performances, academic presentations and exchanges. Findings will be shared via a blog and podcast hosted in the Independent Dance Digital Library and People Dancing website, two peer-reviewed journal articles, two conference presentations and an exhibition documenting the Network activities and findings at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London and online hosted by CSM research website.