The Choreography of Consent: Experiments in Dance / Law Research
The Choreography of Consent AHRC Research 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 and the developing recognition of the refined understanding of movement that dance can bring to legal studies. The Network will bring 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 investigate the following key research questions:
- What the distinctive offering of practice-based dance research to legal and socio-legal research might be?
- How can law and dance be brought together to understand topical societal issues in a way that avoids simplistic oppositions between language based and embodied ways of looking at things?
- How might dance-based research enrich understandings of consent and in turn, how can legal forms of consent enrich dance research-specific, or dance embedded understandings of consent?
Over four events during 2025 and 2026, 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.
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, peer-reviewed journal articles, conference presentations and an exhibition documenting the Network activities and findings, to be hosted at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London, and online by the CSM research website.
The Network is led by Dr Anna Macdonald (dance artist and Course Leader MA Performance: Society at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London) and Marie-Andrée Jacob (Professor of Law at University of Leeds), with project partners People Dancing and Independent Dance, and collaborator Institute of Advanced Legal Studies.