If law is lived through bodies, then its interpretation should not remain confined to the linguistic and the textual, which constitute the written archive. Inscribed with balletic elegance and poetic prose, Anna Jayne Kimmel’s Legal Moves: Choreographies of Race, Law, and Empire articulates a minor jurisprudence of flesh. Recognising the limits of the law and literature, and law and performance as subdisciplines, which, for all their humanistic ambition, still privilege script, rhetoric and plot over corporeality, proprioception and somatic memory, Kimmel extends Robert Cover’s jurispathic and jurisgenerative vocabulary from ‘Nomos and Narrative’ into the kinaesthetic space of dance and choreography, thereby claiming a space for the body on the jurisprudential stage. The book expands what counts as legal text and invites law’s attention to the body and to the flesh, leading the way towards more ‘corporeal, plural, and relational … ways of knowing’ (p. 2).
In steering the traditional logocentric approach to law towards a method that is corporeal and embodied, Kimmel assembles performance pieces, sifts through legal statutes and histories, engages theory and channels her own kinaesthetic and embodied experience as a trained dancer. More than rendering visible and legible how law conscripts the body and how the flesh eludes the law’s attention, she presents ‘law and the choreographic as co-constituting ideologies which press back against one another in jurisgenerative and jurispathic manners alike’ (p. 13). Legal Moves is a trailblazing book that treats choreography not merely as a metaphor, but as a jurisprudential method – one that exposes how law produces governable bodies while locating in the flesh, through its movement and performance, the immanent power to contest, remake and reinterpret the legal.
Centred on the civil law and penal codes in the francophone world and the United States of America, the book is composed of two parts, each encompassing three chapters. Part I, Keeping Score, examines the historical entanglement of dance and law, while Part II, Righting Wrongs, moves into the terrain of human rights. The interlude, Sycorax’s Alterity, recentres the reader on the critical agenda of the project by positioning the absence of Sycorax, the antagonist in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, who has died before the play begins and therefore receives no lines, as an ‘alternative, non-linguistic’ form of presence (p. 103). As such, the interlude further motivates the shift from the linguistic to the corporeal and reinforces the body as a site of knowledge that can generate the potential to enrich legal discourses.
Chapter One, Con/Scripting Law, lays the theoretical foundation for the book. Kimmel begins by juxtaposing the promulgation of the Code Noir, Raoul-Auger Feuillet’s dance-notation system in Chorégraphie, ou l’Art de décrire la danse and Louis XIV’s mandate establishing a retirement pension for Opéra-Ballet performers at the age of forty-two. This unexpected contrast renders visible a shared but frequently overlooked logic between dance and law: despite their markedly different forms and purposes, both participate in conscripting and disciplining bodies and their movements. To explain how legal forms operate choreographically, Kimmel distinguishes dance notation from the dance score. She associates dance notation with a retrospective, jurispathic function and the dance score with an anticipatory, jurisgenerative capacity. Whereas notation records and circumscribes movement, the score sets movement in motion without exhausting its possibilities. Kimmel’s investment in the score lies in its openness, which reserves space for improvisation and the possibility of moving otherwise. This distinction between notation and score supplies the conceptual vocabulary for the chapters that follow. The chapter closes with her experience of participating in the dance score of There Might Be Others, through which she illustrates how dance methods might reorient law from a ‘vertical trajectory of proximity’ to a ‘horizontal line of relationality’ (p. 48).
If Chapter One establishes the body’s capacity to move otherwise, Chapter Two, Fleshing Legality, delves into the legal archive of the Code Noir and its performative re-enactments, asking what the moving and sensing body might allow jurisprudence to know otherwise. The Code Noir emerges as a choreo-jurispathic dance notation implicated in France’s nation-building project, defining Frenchness through its contrast with racial otherness. Understanding that the body, recording the fleshed experience, can act as legal archive, Kimmel proposes to read the Code Noir in a way that is attuned to ‘how the body is [both] pre-scribed’ and ‘de-scribed’ (p. 63). Such a methodology seeks to return sentience to the flesh, foregrounding the violence that the Code Noir inflicts on the Black body and thereby exposing its barbarism. Louis Clapisson’s opera Code Noir (1842) subsequently illustrates how performance can reinforce the status quo when it ‘fail[s] to materialize the raced body as an agential body’ and remains ‘circumscribed by the logocentric logic of the speech act’ (p. 62). The chapter concludes with Pélagie Gbaguidi’s and Pascale Marthine Tayou’s artistic engagements with the Code Noir, both of which interpret and reproduce sections of the text to underscore the ‘absented flesh of the Code Noir’s many bodies’ (p. 70). Taken together, these various interpretations through performances indicate, contrary to the usual narrative of law’s fixed nature, the polysemy and sensory mobility of the law.
The jurisgenerative promise of moving otherwise, however, encounters its complication in Chapter Three, Regulating Rhythms, where Kimmel illustrates the remarkable adaptability of law’s choreographic power. The Code de l’indigénat in Algeria and the Black Codes in the Southern United States exhibit opposing soma-logics that produce different rhythms of movements: the former immobilises racialised bodies, while the latter criminalises racialised bodies for their stillness. Positioning the indigène’s (indigenous person’s) body as othered, non-compliant and defiant – distinct from ‘the body of the citizen’ (p. 82) – the Code de l’indigénat ‘defaults to a series of ought nots’ to ‘choreograph a vision of compliance’ (p. 85). Mapped on to the semiotics of choreography, the Code de l’indigénat is neither a notational practice nor a score practice, but a code that warps legal time, moving ‘bodies into positions of [perpetual] legal stasis’ (p. 87). The Black Codes, by contrast, reflect ‘the legal anxiety centered around the idle body’ in America’s evolving capitalist society (p. 87). Vagrancy law, for example, polices the racialised idle body, while the loitering laws ‘misunderstand the objectivity of the body and its gestures’ (p. 90). Citing legal cases such as Thompson v. City of Louisville and Garner v. Louisiana, Kimmel cautions that without ‘rigorous and meaningful vocabulary when addressing the corporeal’ (p. 90), ‘legal rhetoric slips between the permissible policing of conduct to the impermissible policing of status’ (p. 90). Resisting the juridic association of stillness with non-doing, Niv Acosta and Fannie Sosa’s Black Power Naps (2019–22) and Jo Kreiter’s The Wait Room (2019) are staged in the chapter finale as counter-performances where stillness – the horizontal as opposed to the vertical body – is advocated as ‘active construction’ and as ‘rest, care, and recovery’ (p. 94). Stillness thus becomes a counter-choreographic practice that defies the temporal and kinetic demands law places upon racialised bodies.
Chapter Four, Policing Dignity, turns its gaze to the 1961 Paris massacre and situates it within the thread of dignity in human-rights discourse to show how allegedly universal values become differentially recognisable across bodies. Kimmel reads dignity as ‘an aesthetic code’ and ‘embodied repertoire’, and argues that ‘dignity is not, as often upheld, a universal liberty but rather, in Foucauldian terms, a regulatory ideal’ (p. 115). In parallel to the timeless high art of ballet originating from French aristocratic history, the supposedly universal image of the ‘dignified’ person is derived from and shaped by a provincialised Eurocentric aestheticism. Yet this aesthetic is not a neutral repertoire whose performance guarantees recognition: its signs are interpreted through the racial and colonial identity of the body performing them. Although the peaceful Algerian demonstrators performed dignity through non-violent comportment, their vulnerable bodies were nevertheless subjected to police brutality. As such, the supposedly universal ideal of dignity fractures in its corporeal application. The archives again reproduce the exclusion of Algerians from recognition as dignified, fully human legal subjects by invoking the honour of French officials while reducing Algerian victims from persons to cadavers. The chapter terminates by contrasting the massacre with the Paris Opéra dancers’ 2019 Swan Lake protest, with no legal consequences; rapt in its focus on the corporeal, the chapter establishes that dignity has been provincialised and its status as a universal human right is compromised when its protection depends on whose body performs it.
Against these histories of corporeal regulation and differential legibility, Chapter Five, Touching Associations, turns from the governed body towards the potential constituent force of the plural bodies assembling. It begins with the poetic protest of the seventeen-year-old ballerina Melissa Ziad against the fifth term of then Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Her solo performance as protest appears at odds with the necessarily violent, uncivil or disobedient crowd theorised by Le Bon (p. 136). Against this anxiety towards the collective body, the chapter insightfully proposes that an assembly can ‘cast a peaceful, trained, disciplined tone’, as in Ziad’s dance (p. 138). Noting the absence of an express right to association in the United States Constitution, and its presence in the Algerian Constitution, the discussion turns to the distinction between the right to association, a matter of ‘identifying with’, and the right to assembly, which focuses on ‘being with’, that is, proximity of body in a shared space. Whereas the right to association focuses on ‘relationality severed from the body’, ‘assembly allows us to sense the needs and precarity of the collective, to feel each other, to touch and be touched’ (p. 140). The distinction matters jurisprudentially because it relocates the understanding of assembly from the abstraction of shared identity to the material presence of gathered bodies. Drawing on her own experience as a dancer, Kimmel challenges the idea that bodily proximity and the touch that results within a crowd necessarily lead to violence. Instead, she points out that touch can bring knowledge, trust and care: touch, she writes, ‘has the chance to stem from gentle roots’ (p. 148).
The last chapter, Un/Becoming Humanisms, is dedicated to two performances, both of which echo the entanglement between the body and law, and the embodiment of law. Human Writes gathers a group of dancers tasked to use their body to write the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whereas the Human Rights Tattoo Project aims to inscribe the same declaration on to the participants’ skin. In the former, the body acts as a techne of law; in the latter, the body annotates law. Both projects collapse the distance between the body and the law that Legal Moves throughout has sought to unsettle. Kimmel’s turn from dignity towards vulnerability further shifts the human-rights subject away from the image of an autonomous bearer of universal attributes and towards a relational body constituted through exposure and dependence upon others.
Across its six chapters, Legal Moves progressively pivots the body’s jurisprudential position from an object of legal prescription towards a potential source of legal knowledge and normative authority. Yet that movement is neither linear nor uncomplicated. The possibility of ‘moving otherwise’ challenges law’s capacity to regulate movement and stillness alike; corporeal knowledge confronts the unequal conditions under which bodies become legally legible; and the body constituted by law nevertheless reappears, particularly in assembly, as a potential constituent of normative worlds. It is through this tension between the choreographed and the choreographing body that Kimmel’s jurisprudence takes shape.
In choreographing dance between the Terpsichorean and the nomological, Kimmel tactfully clarifies ambiguities where possible and preserves – or even produces – ambiguity where necessary to demonstrate the complexity of their entanglement. Attentive throughout to the reader’s experience, she takes care to unpack conceptual nuances, concluding each chapter with a lucid synthesis that guides the reader through the richness of her argument. The laws, events and performances assembled across the chapters move, at times in staccato, across centuries (the Code Noir in the seventeenth century to the Swan Lake Protest in the twenty-first century of our era) and jurisdictions (France, Algeria, and the United States of America). Rather than tracing a continuous historical genealogy, Kimmel moves between temporally distant moments according to their conceptual affinities (such as dignity, vulnerability, relationality, the choreo-jurispathic and choreo-jurisgenerative). The result is a book advancing through unexpected proximities, allowing at times historically disparate materials to illuminate one another.
By the book’s conclusion, Kimmel has convincingly demonstrated the inadequacy of a jurisprudence insufficiently equipped to apprehend the corporeal and has furnished legal scholars with a rich vocabulary of movement, flesh, gesture, touch and somatic knowledge. Less settled is what it would mean for legal actors and institutions to operationalise this corporeal attunement: How might the concept of choreo-jurisgenerativity alter the interpretation of evidence, legal doctrine or judgment in practice? If the body is simultaneously the site of law’s inscription and the proposed site of law’s transformation, against law’s jurispathic history of prescribing movements and policing stillness, how could the body maximise its jurisgenerative potential to move otherwise? To demand a ready-made response to these questions would, however, misunderstand a project that presents itself as an opening rather than an endpoint. The dance score matters precisely because it does not determine in advance every movement that follows. Thanks to Kimmel’s work, the directions for future inquiry are open.
Through rigorous and meticulous analysis, Legal Moves argues effectively that corporeal movement itself possesses epistemological and jurisgenerative force, and therefore that dance studies can change not merely what legal scholars study but what they recognise as legal knowledge. In this way, the book reorients dance studies from politics towards law while redirecting law’s attention towards the dancing and performing body, and towards the flesh that animates it. In suturing sentience to flesh and flesh back to the body, Kimmel makes whole the human that Western jurisprudence has so often fragmented. With Legal Moves, Kimmel establishes herself as a formidable new voice in legal humanities, whose scholarship promises to set both the fields of dance and law in motion.
