Abstract

This visual essay juxta-poses dance notations, law, photographs, and quotations as a means of showing how VisAbility uses inclusive dance to perform prefigurative law (Cooper 2020) in post-war Sri Lanka. Such dance-as-law – or, more accurately, dance-as-if-law – is yet another style of legal dance (Mulcahy 2021). VisAbility empowers disabled people (often war-wounded) to dance as-if Sri Lanka has implemented the UN Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which it ratified in 2016, into domestic law. In one 2017 performance, a disabled man does a slow, awkward pas de deux with his prosthetic leg in a bustling marketplace in Batticaloa. This “interventionalist performance” (Hadley 2014) in an everyday public space does two things. First, it makes manifest that the lack of equal access hasn’t changed despite court rulings: “This court recognizes that people have different levels of ability to move freely, and that many … are restricted in their movement” (Dr. Ajith C.S. Perera v. Attorney General and Others (2009)). Second, and more importantly, it shows how “when subjects are denied spaces to perform their equality they may create alternative spaces through dance” (Mills 2017)

How to Cite:

Waldorf, L., Umagiliya, M. E. & Marambio, H. U., (2026) “Dancing “As If”: Performing Prefigurative Law in Post-War Sri Lanka”, Law Text Culture 29(1), 69–86. doi: https://doi.org/10.14453/ltc.1866