In February of this year, a new feminist blog called The Morrigan launched in Ireland as part of the Doing Feminist Legal Work Network. It features a mixture of Irish and international feminist legal thinking. This piece is a cross-posting from The Morrigan.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
In the first week of December 2024, Lawyers on Stage Theatre Society (LOST) mounted four performances of Animal Farm for sold-out audiences at Victoria, British Columbia’s Langham Court Theatre.[2] The play, Ian Wooldridge’s adaptation of George Orwell’s classic, put fascism front and centre. Almost 80 years since the book’s publication, its themes about the fragile state of democracies, the rise of totalitarianism, inequality, political violence, fake news and revolution resonate today. The cast and crew of Animal Farm, members, for the most part, of the legal profession in Victoria had been working together for about three months, volunteering their time. And, while we were learning, rehearsing, and creating art, we lived with the omnipresent final moments of the US election, and its ripples in our lives. For a group of legal professionals, the story of Animal Farm was eerily present.
As a law professor who draws on alternative modes of engagement in my teaching and scholarship, I endeavour to involve myself in theatre in some capacity every year, usually as an actor. This year, however, I was asked to step into the role of stage manager, giving me a differently situated engagement in the telling of this story of the “ever-present shadow of incipient tyranny.” Alongside my colleagues who were acting, directing and on the crew, I found that collaborating on this particular form of legal storytelling left me deeply reflective on the power of art and the role of legal education in a world engaging with the rise of conservativism.
In this blog post I am to do three things. First, offer some reflections on the power of arts-based practices in the work of law, with attention both to the questions that arise in the collision of law and theatre, as well as in the ways that these questions inform the learning of law.
Second, offer some thoughts on how my engagement with Animal Farm as a jurisprudential text was shaped by my role as stage manager.
And finally, extend a feminist (albeit brief) read of the rise of fascism that the play lays bare, to offer some cautionary lessons learned, particularly with respect to the role of art in the law school classroom.
Art as Law
In her article,” Law and Humanities: A Field without a Canon” Sara Ramshaw connects arts-based practices to the processes of law, a methodology that is “ever in flux and alive to possibility.” The power of alternative ways of being and knowing, like storytelling, scrapbooking, image theatre, dance, games, beading and sculpting, rest in their capacities to destabilize hegemonies and worldviews, offering an “opportunity to create a post-colonial and critical lens through which we may view and validate non-Western and non-dominant cultures and epistemologies … while broadening the scope of what constitutes legitimate systems and forms of knowledge.” And while paying attention to the ways that non-textual sources have been used at our institution to teach law, the insights are also apt for the ways that legal questions can be differently understood when interrogated through art.
For many of us working in law and the humanities the insight that law and art are deeply entwined with claims of authority is not a novel concept. Thinking about law through the lens of art opens up possibilities of voice, and moves us away from an approach that privileges “a self-regulating minority for whom the law is but another means to exclude others from its ranks.” As Joan Kee argues, “how artworks affect the body that speaks, thinks, and acts explains why performance and performativity have been so generative for legal scholars.” In a moment where conservative politics and irrationality are omnipresent, the opportunity to step inside a play that puts resistance to fascism at its heart, provided an unexpected means through which to query the “humanity, mortality and precarity” of the moment.
Putting on a play is, thus, one way to embrace perspective and challenge the ways that law “as a closed, specialist body of knowledge has dismissed non-textual and non-legal knowledge” and to “push the boundaries of what constitutes effective critical legal analysis.” As Desmond Manderson asserts, legal words can be “tyrannically linear” but opening up those words through performativity, can render the concepts both more accessible and create space for compassion. In essence, a play that centres tyranny can through its very performance democratize the questions at its heart. This is, in an odd way, my experience of mounting Animal Farm in the fall of 2024, exposing the “messy entrails” of power run amok, was a means through which to look more deeply into the consequences of that exercise of power.
As a legal educator I embrace that learning law is not a purely intellectual pursuit and that it must involve embodied learning to be complete. Indeed, using a play to teach law – something that I have tried here at UVic Law on several occasions — is a “means through which legal educators can challenge our future legal advocates to rethink where law is situated and how important the surrounding narratives are to legal understandings.” Being in a play for a commercial audience changes the frame only slightly. Still, it is a way to “unsettle the conventional narratives, keep systemic issues present and focus the [audience] onto the lived human issues of race, class, gender, and citizenship in a shifting time.”
In asking whether art can fight fascism, Justin Kaushall asks:
Taking up the argument of philosopher Theodor Adorno, Kaushall defines art’s capacity to make its audiences aware of violence – as it appears in capitalism and fascism – alongside its power to express hope, something that is difficult to fully communicate in any language. In mounting the play version of Animal Farm with a cast of lawyers and an audience of Victoria theatre goers we sat witness to questions that existed beyond the text. What kind of critical thought becomes possible that might not otherwise? What becomes possible in the face of a rise of fascism, in turning to art? What meanings were constructed, what social imaginaries engaged, when we began to play?
Seeing the play from the wings and behind the stage
Stage managing Animal Farm for LOST asked me to sit in a different frame from the cast and the directors, and to pay careful and detailed attention to the technical arts of storytelling. From the first read through, I positioned myself elsewhere in the room, and I watched the mediation that took place between the vision that the directors brought and the response that each actor had to the constraints and creativity. Like opposing counsel at a judicial case conference, the to and fro between the parties ran the gamut of emotion from heart-rending to transformational; with commitments to try things on and work things out tenuous at moments and pure delight at others. My contributions were often offerings about what the audience might witness when the play was viewed from beyond the stage.
As stage manager I also began to bear the weight of the other elements of the story, the props and lights and sounds that began to emerge as critical to the telling, and anchors to the art. And the worlds of the technical, new to me, began to emerge, the traditions of the theatre and its people, the book with its pencilled and erased blocking, and ultimately the deeply ingrained calling of the show that need to happen, night after night. And still, I felt it in my bones, after each rehearsal, and as we moved towards the final week, the urgency of telling with integrity the story of what happened to those animals when they began to assume the mantels of power and turned on each other.
Ultimately for the run of the show, I moved away from the actors, the directors, and the physicality of the play, up into the booth at the back of the theatre. There I took on more of the responsibility of what the audience would see and feel; ensuring that the beauty of the show resonated through the choreographies of light and sound. But I never stopped being a person who thinks first and foremost about the classroom, and about the importance of the embodied in the learning and practice of law. In telling this story at this moment, something different happened. Stage managing Animal Farm, laid bare the collective power of creating art, and in that engendering, a way to be in a world that is aching, and to do that with a pedagogy of hope.
Othernesses and Differences
Let me conclude by arguing that asking questions about democracy through a collective, amateur, and legal rendering ofAnimal Farm was a feminist act; offering the possibility of multiple viewpoints, “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries”and the capacity to hold multiple truths at the same time. The combination of art and law that animates Animal Farm the play made visible a “multiplicity of othernesses and differences” creating space for compassion and bringing to the fore gendered questions that otherwise lay buried, both in the story and in the production of the story.
Animal Farm is not a feminist text. It is written in a time and tenor that isn’t inclusive in its language, or in its conceptualization of power. Its characters are for the most part male, with the female characters lesser, in places demeaned for their shallowness, and mostly without power. And in the production of our play, there were hard moments where sexist practices surfaced without challenge. And yet, our cast was mostly female and non-binary actors, our production team almost solely women, and the story that our play ultimately told was one where the final moments were not of animals who could not longer be distinguished from humans, but a moment between a parent and child, where care and compassion created space for hope.
A feminist approach to this story of law also asked us to create art ethically. Like the Scottish Feminist Judgments Project, working to put on Animal Farm made it possible to “bring home to a range of audiences how legal notions of neutrality and objectivity can be exposed and eviscerated, and the importance of perspective and ‘ethical imagination’ in achieving social justice.” And in the process, asking questions about democracy, power, anarchy and privilege through a play, opens up law to a different kind of engagement than might otherwise be possible. Particularly in the social media-soaked world in which we find ourselves, day in and day out worrying about the possibility of corrupt governments to our south and in our midst.
LOST is a theatre company that provides our local legal community with a means through which to give back. And since 2017, its plays have been successful, drawing on the volunteerism of the profession, to raise monies for local front-line organizations. Animal Farm, like the plays before it, had full houses and enthusiastic support. And yet, the play this year offered all of us involved, a different way to be, an opportunity to see things with our bodies, and unexpectedly a means to stand inside the art as a form of resistance.
[1] Gillian Calder is a Professor of Law at the University of Victoria’s Faculty of Law. This piece is written with huge gratitude to my colleagues Rebecca Johnson (in the role of Snowball) and Sara Ramshaw (president of LOST and co-director for Animal Farm), alongside the entire cast and crew of Animal Farm 2024.
[2] Please see http://lawyersonstage.com for a detailed listing of the cast, crew, supporters and team at LOST who enabled this year’s production.
