The Law of the Body: On Ballet, Interpretation, and Why a Law Firm Sponsors the Arts
It started with a question I couldn’t shake.
Why would a law firm sponsor a ballet company?
Last Friday in Amsterdam, I sat in the velvet dark of the Dutch National Opera & Ballet as the orchestra tuned for Romeo and Juliet. The curtain lifted on Rudi van Dantzig’s 1967 choreography, revived on the Main Stage from 14 October to 11 November 2025. Nothing in it was new, yet nothing felt old. Juliet’s suspended back-bend, Romeo’s sudden lunge, and other familiar gestures arrived as if invented in real time. This paradox, the same yet not the same, captures what Hans-Georg Gadamer called hermeneutic understanding: interpretation not as a scholarly exercise but as the condition of all understanding. In his words: “being that can be understood is language.” Law, scripture, and art survive through re-performance. A statute lives through judgment and a score lives through dance. Watching Romeo and Juliet, I realized dancers and jurists engage in the same work: turning constraint into expression and repetition into meaning.
In fact, Houthoff’s collaboration with the Dutch National Opera & Ballet is part of a quiet, global pattern linking law and dance. In Australia, Herbert Smith Freehills has supported The Australian Ballet for more than a decade, offering both sponsorship and legal counsel. In France, CMS Legal sponsors Lyon’s Maison de la Danse under its responsible-business programme. In the United Kingdom, professional-services firms such as Trinity Bridge work with Northern Ballet to connect precision industries with performative arts. Across jurisdictions, the pairing recurs: institutions built on statute and precedent aligning with art forms built on score and repetition.
I. The partnership that puzzled me
Houthoff has served as the main sponsor of Dutch National Opera & Ballet since 2018, renewing the partnership in January 2025. The company credits the partnership with sustaining new productions and nurturing talent. Houthoff says it has “bridged the cultural and legal world.” More than sponsorship, it’s a shared investment in precision, discipline, and public meaning.
The more I read, the more I saw the symmetry. Both institutions depend on structure, and both transform that structure into feeling. A law firm drafts and interprets statutes. A ballet company reads and re-reads a score. Each creates a living tradition that outlives any single participant.
II. Interpretation as the bloodstream of both fields
Before hermeneutics belonged to art or theology, it belonged to law. Roman jurists developed interpretatio as a method for reading statutes and contracts. Centuries later, Hans-Georg Gadamer turned it into a general theory of understanding. His point was simple but radical: to understand is to interpret. We grasp meaning not by observing from the outside, but by performing it within its living forms.
That’s precisely what unfolds on stage. Sergei Prokofiev composed Romeo and Juliet in 1935; his initial version–with a non-tragic ending–met resistance from Soviet authorities, prompting revisions and delay. The complete ballet premiered in Brno in 1938 and in the Soviet Union in 1940. Rudi van Dantzig translated the work into a Dutch choreographic language in 1967, creating the first full-length Dutch ballet. Every revival re-interprets him anew. The work endures because it is continually re-performed, just as law endures because courts and practitioners continually re-interpret precedent.
Legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin called this law as integrity. Each judgment must offer the best constructive interpretation of the legal record so far: faithful to the past, coherent in the present, and forward-looking to the future. Replace “judgment” with “performance,” and you have the philosophy of dance.
III. The rule that sets you free
Both domains depend on rules. Not to restrain expression but to enable it. Rules create the space in which expression matters.
In dance, notation systems like Labanotation record direction, level, duration, and dynamic quality. These enable choreography reproduction without losing its soul. In law, Lon Fuller’s “inner morality of law” defines the structure that makes justice intelligible: rules must be public, clear, coherent, practicable, and stable over time. A bad rule, like a flawed score, collapses the entire performance. Kant would call this “purposiveness without purpose,” the sense that something fits perfectly without needing a reason. A well-argued case or a well-executed pas de deux both produce that feeling.
Legal positivists remind us that law derives its authority from institutions rather than intrinsic moral content. Dance scholars say the same of choreography. A ballet exists because companies, teachers, and audiences continually uphold its form. Beauty and legitimacy arise not in spite of structure, but because structure works.
IV. Institutions as interpreters
The partnership between Houthoff and the Dutch National Opera & Ballet carries genuine philosophical weight. It sustains the very conditions that make interpretation possible. Through its sponsorship, Houthoff finances the infrastructure. From talent development, to production workshops and rehearsal studios, their support allows the company to restage canonical works with integrity. The Ballet, in turn, embodies the virtues that legal institutions claim as their own: discipline, coherence, excellence, and interpretive skill. Each institution completes the other. Law demonstrates how order can become beautiful; art demonstrates that order must also be felt. In Hans-Georg Gadamer’s terms, their collaboration forms a fusion of horizons: the legal and the aesthetic meeting in a single, intelligible act.
Coda
When the curtain fell on Romeo and Juliet, the theatre held its breath. Applause arrived a moment late, as if the audience needed a moment to absorb what it had seen. That tiny delay, half a second of shared breath, captured what both law and art strive for: order that moves, structure that still feels alive. That, finally, is why a law firm sponsors a ballet. Both believe that rules, when interpreted with care, can still move us. I suppose it also doesn’t hurt that the intermission bar serves better champagne than most boardrooms.
References
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (1960).
Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Romeo and Juliet (ballet by Prokofiev).”
Dutch National Ballet archives, Romeo and Juliet (2025–2026 season programme).
Houthoff, “Partnership with Dutch National Opera & Ballet,” press release (16 January 2025).
Lon L. Fuller, The Morality of Law (1964).
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790).
Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (1986).
Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Labanotation (notation system).”
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Legal Positivism.”
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Philosophy of Dance.”
Herbert Smith Freehills, “Partnering with the Arts,” HSF Kramer Alumni Matters (2024).
CMS Legal, “Responsible Business – Arts & Culture.”
Trinity Bridge Risk Management, “Partners and Sponsorships.”
