Abstract

don’t wear: anything that reveals your thick skin the courage beneath your hair strands the genius they keep your red lips the dissent concealed lady justice might be blindfolded but the men guarding her aren’t. This excerpt from a poem is a part analysis of some qualitative interviews I did with Indian legal experts. Through these interviews, I was investigating the influence of lived experiences on the processes of law-making, and therefore, on law itself. These interviews are part of a larger project, towards an Information Theory of Law or ‘ITL’ (Bhumika Billa 2023). ITL is a theoretical framework that models the legal system as a communication system and critically examines the processes by which law translates or codes social reality. The fieldwork was an attempt to examine the role of the lived realities of agents on the black letter of the law i.e. legal experts—broadly defined as experts who can access legal language, or the legal coding processes more generally (including parliamentarians, legislative assistants, lawyers, judges, clerks, policy experts, academics and so on). Soon into the analysis, these rhymes and rhythms took off the page, entering the realm of an embodied inquiry, culminating into a short filmpoem titled ‘(IN)VISIBLE’. The film brought together dance, poetry, sound, and colour to not only present—but also study—the rhythms of the legal coding processes, with India as a case study. The film introduces ‘creative methods’ as an underexplored alternative to doctrinal and empirical methods in law and demonstrates how a creative praxis in legal research can offer additional tools to capture historically excluded information from the legal coding processes (Bhumika Billa 2025 forthcoming). Historical and repetitive exclusion of lived realities (or certain aspects of lived realities) from these legal coding processes has often rendered marginalised bodies illegible for law (Folúkẹ́ Adébísí 2023). Creative methods can therefore give language to those rendered illegible. One of the challenges with creative methods, particularly when provoked for knowledge-production, is its lack of reproducibility (or ‘lack of method’). To address this critique, I will build on my broader case for creative methods to propose and formalise ‘choreopoetry’ as legal method. The paper will be grounded in three theoretical frameworks—ITL, Rhythmanalysis (Henri Lefebvre 2004), and Dance as Legal Method (Sean Mulcahy 2021). Using the case of (IN)VISIBLE, I will specifically explore two questions: (1) What can embodied and rhythmic inquiries, combined, contribute to our understandings of law-society interactions? (2) How can dance become a means of knowledge production? I will use the film, and fresh discussion around it, to introduce a new theoretical concept of ‘embodied dislocation’—demonstrating how we can only know some things by doing things (Danish Sheikh 2021), or dancing them in this case.

How to Cite:

Billa, B., (2026) “Lives, Letters, and Rhythms of Law: Choreopoetry as a Socio-Legal Method”, Law Text Culture 29(1), 125–139. doi: https://doi.org/10.14453/ltc.1857