As reported on earlier, GLaD team member, Dr Sean Mulcahy, recently participated in the Visiting Scholars Program at the Peter A. Allard School of Law in the University of British Columbia. The visit also included an interview with Canadian law and humanities scholar-practitioners Sara Ramshaw and Julie Lassonde.
Sara is a legal scholar at the University of Victoria who has focussed on jazz improvisation as a metaphor for justice. 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.
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.
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.”
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.”
Their work parallels our own interest in dance, performance, and the theatricality of legal processes surrounding human rights and law-making. We are grateful to Julen Etxabe of the University of British Columbia and the Canadian Network of Law and Humanities for facilitating this Visiting Scholarship that included this interview, which you can listen to in full here.