The Unwritten
Law.

Written and performed by Snow, The Unwritten Law follows the relationship between personal memory and a larger American history. The story moves through his family’s roots in the South, the legacy of incarceration, the responsibilities of fatherhood and experiences of homelessness, toward a life in the arts.

The work’s form makes room for several ways of remembering. Snow’s words carry the narrative; dance, live instruments, beatboxing and projected images give its people and places a physical and musical presence. Intimate family moments sit beside the wider forces that shape a life.

Snow describes The Unwritten Law as a choreopoem. Its storytelling is shared across voice, movement and music: a spoken memory can become a danced relationship, while the live score carries feeling between scenes. The audience encounters the story through the body as well as through language.

Rebecca Arends is the work’s co-creator, director and choreographer, and also performs in it. Her collaboration with Snow brings the spoken text into an ensemble setting, where dancers embody figures from the narrative. In their 2017 artist interview, Snow and Arends discuss how collaborators helped transform a personal history into a work for the stage.

A.J. Khaw has been a musical collaborator on The Unwritten Law since its 2017 debut. For the 2017 Dixon Place engagement, he and Varuni Tiruchelvam composed the original music and performed onstage, on piano and cello respectively. The 2018 engagement credited original music by Khaw, Tiruchelvam and Laura Dadap.

The production also evolved through its performers and visual artists. The 2017 company included Arends, Winston Dynamite Brown and Maleek Washington, with Brown and Washington appearing at different performances. That engagement featured lighting by Ro-Z and projections by Emre Emirgil. The 2018 engagement featured Arends and Washington, lighting by Ro-Z and projections by Jo Sobieski.

Commissioned by Dixon Place, The Unwritten Law received its world-premiere workshop there in January 2017. It returned that summer for six performances from July 30 through August 14, followed by a September 5–29, 2018 engagement.

Development continued at Two River Theater in 2021, with A.J. Khaw serving as music director for a workshop. These stages of development trace the work from its first Dixon Place workshop to further exploration with a regional theater.