The Democracy Cycle

What is The Democracy Cycle?

In January 2024, the Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC) and Civis Foundation partnered to launch The Democracy Cycle, a commissioning program designed to support new works that illuminate the promise, practice, imperfection, and opportunity of democracy.

Over five years, The Democracy Cycle will commission and develop 25 new performing arts works across theater, dance, music, opera, and multidisciplinary performance.  The commissioned works, selected over the course of three annual Rounds of Open Calls, will explore themes related to the nature, practice, and experience of democracy.

The Democracy Cycle supports artists' works from initial research and early workshops through script development, readings, and technical residencies.  The works listed below reflect projects at varying stages of development.  

2024 Commissions

• At the Altar (working title) – Baye & Asa
  A new evening-length duet that reckons with the pitfalls of extreme idolatry and interrogates our collective struggle for survival and salvation, asking who we worship, how we worship, and what the health of any democratic system requires of us.
  • Multiple residencies complete; world premiere scheduled January 2027.
• The Puerto Rico Experiment – Angélica Negrón 
  A tropical electronic song cycle — equal parts concert, inquiry, and collective dream — interrogating what it means for a territory without full political representation to be repeatedly treated as a laboratory. Created with four Puerto Rican poets and performed with GRAMMY-winning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth.
  • Active residency development underway, world premiere scheduled January 2027.
• Estampida Humana – Pablo Manzi / Bonobo Teatro 
  A theatrical work exploring the complex ways of building democracy in contexts where the sense of the public and the communitarian have been destroyed — set against the legacy of U.S. intervention in Chile and the privatization of everyday life it produced.
  • Premiered at Santiago a Mil festival, 2025; recipient of the Chilean Critics Circle Award for Best Theatre Production.
• The Truth Beneath – Talvin Wilks and Paul Schiff Berman 
  A time-shifting fractured narrative about memory, politics, social media, and disinformation's effect on a functioning democracy, created in consultation with Maria Ressa — co-founder of Philippine journalism site Rappler and 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner.
  • In script development.
• America's Kingdoms – Javaad Alipoor 
  A satirical documentary theater work investigating the way oil and petro-capitalism impact democracy — not only in the United States, but across the Middle East and Latin America — from the rise of the motorcar to the sovereign wealth funds that underpin modern AI.
  • In research and script development phase.
• Six Nations: One Fire –  Vickie Ramirez, Ty Defoe, and Jeanette Harrison 
  A new performance blending text, movement, and song to explore the timeless wisdom of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy's Great Law of Peace — an Indigenous framework for unity, justice, and consensus-based governance that influenced the founders of the United States, and that speaks urgently to the present.
  • In script development; residency at Kaatsbaan planned for Summer 2026.
• Sovereignty Hymns – Abigail Nessen Bengson and Shaun Bengson
  A live cantata and communal storytelling experience honoring body sovereignty, performed with local choirs in theaters, churches, and gathering spaces across the country. Rather than a performance an audience comes to watch, it is something a community comes to do.
  • In development.
• Estebanico (working title) – Paul Pinto 
  A multilingual operatic spectacle that refocuses this country's founding mythology — centering the American origin story on Estebanico, an enslaved sailor, faith healer, and conquistador who traversed what is now the American Southwest five hundred years ago.
  • Workshop complete; libretto in progress.

2025 Commissions

• Barry, The 1970s Black Sitcom That Never Happened – Nathan Yungerberg
  A new play refracting a fictional 1970s sitcom through an Afro-surreal prism — exposing the liberal veneer that masked the daily brutality inflicted on Black families pioneering Midwestern suburbia despite America's democratic promises. Democracy fractures where the laugh track stops.
  • In script development.
• Civilities, or How to Secede Without Really Trying – Holly Bass 
  A satire using texts from 1860 to the present that imagines the Confederate states as Southern belles grappling with politics, soft power, and propriety — exploring the limits of empathy and the ways white femininity has been deployed to both advance and hinder political equality.
  • In early development.
• Criptocracy – Molly Joyce 
  A multidisciplinary performance project featuring disabled individuals reflecting on what democratic ideals — freedom, equality, participation, and justice — mean to them, extending the reclaimed disability-culture term "crip" to democracy itself.
  • In early development.
• The Front Line – David Dorfman 
  A new dance/music/theater work set in a middle school gymnasium turned polling site for an imagined Election Day 2040 — exploring and unraveling the act of voting, and what it means to participate in America.
  • Presented during APAP NYC studio showing; in development.
• I Hope This Finds You Well – Samora Pinderhughes 
  A searing examination of the prison industrial complex and a celebration of resilience, repair, and resistance — combining musical compositions, choir, film, and raw audio testimonials to investigate the carceral system and envision alternate routes for our society.
  • Technical residency at Mass MoCA complete; visual art presentation at MoMA, January 2026.
• Museum of the Unamericans – Justine F. Chen 
  A futurist theatrical oratorio that presents select forms of legislated Asian-American racism and asks: Is racism at odds with our democracy when racism is legislated? What does it mean to be American — and who decides?
  • Libretto in progress.
• Proclamation to the Great White Father and All His People – Daniel Leeman Smith and Blossom Johnson 
  A documentary play about the 1969 Indigenous occupation of Alcatraz — showing how a 19-month, pan-Indigenous takeover became a radical experiment in self-governance, and inviting audiences to reflect on sovereignty, justice, and relational governance.
  • Script in progress.
• Reinitas – Sofía Rei and Jasmine Garsd 
  A bilingual multimedia performance following three generations of women in Fremont, Nebraska — a city shaped by the meatpacking industry and mass deportations — asking what happens to democracy when some sectors live in fear, and which parts of American history we choose to remember.
  • In early development.
• Twelve Angry Black Women – Andrea Ambam 
  A new experimental play in which the fate of a peculiar and unprecedented case in American history rests in the hands of an all-Black, all-Femme jury — a theatrical interrogation of the American Experiment through the vital, unfiltered lens of one of the nation's most formidable and misunderstood voting blocs.
  • In script development; design development underway.

Learn more about The Democracy Cycle and how to get involved.