The Democracy Cycle 2024 Recipients
Announcing the 2024 recipients!
Launched as a partnership between PAC NYC and Civis Foundation in January 2024, the first open call of The Democracy Cycle received 450 submissions from around the world. After a first round of review by 27 readers, a panel of 7 arts- and democracy-workers reviewed the finalist proposals and chose the final 8 commissions together.
The artists and artistic collaborations chosen to receive the 2024 Democracy Cycle commissions are Javaad Alipoor; Baye & Asa; Charlotte Brathwaite, June Cross and Sunder Ganglani; Pablo Manzi and Bonobo Teatro; Angélica Negrón; Vickie Ramirez, Ty Defoe and Jeanette Harrison; Abigail Nessen Bengson and The Bengsons; Talvin Wilks and Paul Schiff Berman.
Each selected project will receive $60,000 in support, consisting of a $30,000 commission and another $30,000 for project development.
The 2024 panelists were Ludovic Blain, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Leslie Ishii, Sheila Lewandowski, Samora Pinderhughes, David Thomson, Laurie Woolery.
America’s Kingdoms (working title)
Javaad Alipoor
America’s Kingdoms is a new scripted theater show which offers a satirical account of the rise of big U.S. oil companies and their meddling in Central American and Middle Eastern politics. The show will take the form of a documentary style deep dive into the U.S. State Department’s international oil policies, with cutting-edge projection intersecting with a live electronic history of techno music. At the heart of this project is an investigation into the continued way that oil and petro-capitalism impact on democracy, not only in countries like the U.S., but also in the Middle East and Latin America. From the rise of the motorcar to the sovereign wealth funds that lie at the heart of the venture capital that undergirds new social tech and AI — oil both opens up possibilities for democratic access whilst stifling and drowning them.
Javaad Alipoor
Javaad Alipoor is a British-Iranian writer, director, and performer. He founded The Javaad Alipoor Company in 2019. The Company’s most recent work, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, opened to five-star reviews and sell-out audiences at Battersea Arts Centre and HOME, Manchester. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World then began a world tour, opening in the USA at The University of Michigan and Australia at The Sydney Opera House.
Previously, Javaad Alipoor wrote, co-directed, and performed in The Believers Are But Brothers as an international touring show, and wrote and performed in the TV adaptation for BBC Four. Its follow up, Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran, also co-created with Kirsty Housley, won a Fringe First Award before the COVID-19 lockdown led it to transform into an immersive digital experience. The digital version opened at Battersea Arts Centre, before it toured to Sundance Film Festival and The Public Theatre’s Under the Radar Festival.
Together with Chris Thorpe, Javaad Alipoor wrote and directed the trilingual theatre production, Made of Mannheim, which had its world premiere with Nationaltheater Mannheim and Theaterhaus G7.
Javaad was Resident Associate Director at Sheffield Theatres from 2017-18 where he directed a new version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Prior to this he was Associate Director at Bradford’s Theatre in the Mill from 2015-17. Javaad is involved in politics and activism, co-founding The International Alliance in Support of Iranian Workers, The Syria Solidarity Campaign and a Bradford-based network supporting EU migrants after Brexit. His writing about politics and culture has been featured in The Guardian, The Independent and The Stage. His plays have been published by Oberon and Nick Hern, and his poetry by Art in Usual Places.
At the Altar (working title)
Baye & Asa
At the Altar is Baye & Asa’s new evening-length duet and an exploration of cultural, religious, and political deities. This new dance work reckons with the pitfalls of extreme idolatry and interrogates our collective struggle for survival and salvation. We ask these central questions: Who/what do we worship? How do we worship? Who are the righteous? Who are the blasphemers?
The foundational democratic principles of collective engagement, checks and balances, and ideological plurality are essential for disrupting this extreme idolatry. The health and strength of any democratic system rests in its ability to challenge religious, cultural, and political messiahs. At the Altar is our democratic participation.
Baye & Asa
Baye & Asa is a company creating movement art projects directed and choreographed by Amadi ‘Baye’ Washington & Sam ‘Asa’ Pratt. They grew up together in New York City, and that shared educational history is the mother of their work. Hip-hop & African dance languages are the foundation of their technique. The rhythms of these techniques inform the way they energetically confront contemporary dance, theater, and film. They’ve presented their work at The Joyce Theater, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Pioneer Works, The 92nd Street Y, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Jacob’s Pillow, Guggenheim Works & Process, The American Dance Festival, Yale University, ODC, b12 festival, Florence Dance Festival, Dance Days Chania, University of Maryland, Blacklight Summit, Southampton Arts Center, Bard College, Vassar College, and Battery Dance Festival. They were selected as one of Dance Magazine‘s “25 to Watch” for 2022 and are recipients of Dance Magazine‘s 2023 Harkness Promise Award. They’ve created works for rep companies that include The Martha Graham Dance Company, BODYTRAFFIC, and Alvin Ailey II. Their film work has won numerous awards and has been presented internationally.
Photo: Umi Akiyoshi
Douglass v. Democracy (working title)
Charlotte Brathwaite, June Cross, Sunder Ganglani
Douglass v. Democracy, a new multidisciplinary performance work, investigates American Democracy by way of Frederick Douglass – who was subjected to its injustices and offered its dreams of freedom. Douglass spent his life as a free man documenting – in essays, lectures, public debates, and private correspondence, his obsession with the promise of Democracy. Today, Douglass’ inquiry is more important than ever; his life and work remind us that abolitionist labor is carried out in performance, radical oratory and debate, raucous town hall convenings, intimate but loud questioning in public space. The human voice does the work of abolition, and though his voice was never recorded you can hear it clear as day if you listen. As performed by Keith David, Douglass v. Democracy catches Douglass’s voice in the air and rides it.
DvD reaches back to the origins of Democracy and Western theater, and positions Douglass as Thespis pushed out of the Greek chorus. Douglass turns to face them and demands to know if the people actually have the power, ever had the power, what the power is, what it becomes, and what it would take to make a world that values human life.
Charlotte Brathwaite
Charlotte Brathwaite is a creator and director of original genre-defying works that illuminate the realities and dreams of those whose stories have been marginalized, silenced and ignored. Her trans-disciplinary inquiry manifests as immersive rituals of the body, color and music. She has received major grants, awards and fellowships including Doris Duke, United States Artists, Art Matters, Creative Capital and the Princess Grace. Her work has been presented at festivals and venues across the globe in North and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. Charlotte is Co-Artistic Director of Cornerstone Theater in Los Angeles, founder of Forgotten Paradise Projects in Dakar, Senegal and has an MFA in Directing from Yale University.
Photo: Malick Welli
June Cross
June Cross, a documentary producer and director, is an Emmy, Peabody, and du Pont Columbia Journalism Award winner. Her work explores the intersection of poverty, race, public health, and politics. She joined the faculty of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2001, and received tenure in 2006. Her 2020 documentary, Whose Vote Counts, about efforts to tighten voting laws, received a Peabody award. Cross is best known for a Frontline documentary in which she turned the camera on her own family. Secret Daughter (1996) told her story of being a mixed-race child whose white mother left her to be raised by a Black family. She wrote a memoir with the same title which was published by Viking Press in 2006.
Sunder Ganglani
Sunder Ganglani is an artist and Co-Artistic Director of Cornerstone Theater Company who works in collaboration between forms: music, theater, civil disobedience, pedagogy, performance. As former Co-Artistic Director of The Foundry Theater in NYC his works with W. David Hancock, Ariana Reines, Claudia Rankine, Melanie Joseph and many others have toured nationally and internationally, and won all kinds of awards. As a musician, composer, and organizer he’s grateful to have a creative home with The Stop Shopping Choir community in New York City where he works with Billy Talen, Savitri D, and the 45 member choir as chosen family. He’s received grants, fellowships and been awarded residencies, he studied Anthropology at UMass Amherst, and Dramaturgy at Yale.
Keith David
Keith David is a classically trained actor, three time Emmy Award winner and Tony Award nominee. He is currently shooting a new series for producer JJ Abrams and HBO Max entitled Duster. He is also the voice of Husk in Prime Video’s hit animated series, Hazbin Hotel. Keith’s collaboration with Ken Burns has earned him three Emmy Awards for his narration of Jackie Robinson, The War, and Unforgivable Blackness – The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. Most recently, Keith narrated documentaries Ali and Leonardo Da Vinci, each by Ken Burns. On Broadway, he starred in Seven Guitars and Jelly’s Last Jam (Tony nomination). Born and raised in New York City, Keith is a graduate of the New York High School of the Performing Arts and the Juilliard School.
Estampida Humana
Pablo Manzi and Bonobo Teatro
Estampida Humana, a new theater work by Teatro Bonobo, looks at how the U.S. intervention in Chile during the 1960s and 1970s led to the installation of neoliberal policies and widespread privatization that radically transformed everyday life, leaving Chileans with no sense of community or shared future.
When the neighborhood square is the only public space left, the only sense of community (possibly) still alive, a neighborhood council must decide what to do with a group of homeless people who take over the square. Is the thought of a large-scale community project even possible in a fragmented society? The play explores the complex ways of building democracy in contexts where the sense of the public and the communitarian have been destroyed.
Pablo Manzi
Pablo Manzi is a Chilean playwright, director, and actor. With Bonobo he has created the plays Where the Barbarians Live, You Shall Love and Themis. He is the recipient of the Santiago Municipal Literature Award and the José Nuez Martín award, as well as accolades from the Chilean Arts Critics Circle and the Chilean Ministry of Culture, Arts, and Heritage, selection for Columbia Play Reading Festival (NY, USA). Along with Bonobo he has done an artistic residency at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York (USA). Pablo Manzi was invited by the Royal Court Theatre to do a residency in London where he wrote A Fight Against… which premiered in 2021 at the Royal Court Theatre directed by Sam Pritchard.
Photo: Bastian Sepulveda
BONOBO
Since its creation in 2012, Bonobo has consolidated as one of the Chilean theater companies with the greatest projection in the international circuit. Their productions have been presented in Japan, The Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Sweden, United States, Brazil, Peru, and Mexico, in addition to having received several awards in Chile and abroad. These creations are the result of an extensive work of experimentation and research, based on collective creation and improvisation. Bonobo has carried out a path of research, creation, and staging of the Trilogy of Barbarism, composed by the plays Where the Barbarians Live (2015), You shall love (2018) and Themis (2022), in which it has managed, on the one hand, to consolidate an authorial seal, with black humor and a language that borders on the absurd and discomfort, and a methodology of collective creation and, on the other hand, corroborate the interest and motivation to continue the thematic axis that has been present in the last three creations, that is, the violence and fissures that have been implicitly expressed towards otherness, in a context of liberal democracy, particularly in Chile.
The Puerto Rico Experiment (working title)
Angélica Negrón
Puerto Rican-born Angélica Negrón, Brooklyn based indie electronic transnational band Balún, and Grammy award winning vocal group Roomful of Teeth will collaborate to create a new concert length work that combines Balún’s Puerto Rican heritage and Roomful of Teeth’s signature boundary expanding vocal vocabulary to explore US democratic policies in Puerto Rico. The hyperband created through this collaboration will see Roomful of Teeth and Balún come together as one to sonically explore the role of democracy in Puerto Rico’s current financial crisis as connected to issues caused by post-colonialism and disaster capitalism.
For this tropical electronic song cycle, the text of the pieces will be drawn from two main sources: commissioned Puerto Rican poets, local independent journalists and information extracted in both English and Spanish from court documents pertaining to the relationship between the US and Puerto Rico as defined by the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA). Other sources of inspiration will come from a dialogue between the Roomful of Teeth and Balún in exploration of independence, colonialism, sovereign immunity, illegal debt, disaster capitalism, access to information and the use of Puerto Rico as an experiment.
Angélica Negrón
Angélica Negrón is a Puerto Rican-born composer and multi-instrumentalist. She writes music for voices, orchestras, and film as well as robots, toys, and plants. Angélica is known for playing with the unexpected intersection of classical and electronic music, unusual instruments, and found sounds.
Residencies and commissions include WNYC’s The Greene Space (a 4-part variety show/multimedia exploration of sound and personal history), the NY Botanical Garden (an immersive site-specific work for electronics and 100 voices), and Opera Philadelphia (a drag opera film in collaboration with Mathew Placek and Sasha Velour). Her work has been commissioned by the LA Philharmonic, NY Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra, Kronos Quartet, and Roomful of Teeth. Angélica’s original scores for HBO include the docuseries Menudo: Forever Young and You Were My First Boyfriend directed by Cecilia Aldarondo.
Balún
Balún, a Brooklyn-based electronic indie band, is known for blending transnational influences with a unique tropical sound. Emerging from San Juan’s indie scene over a decade ago, the band has navigated the worlds of music, academia, and the Puerto Rican diaspora, creating a signature style they call “dreambow”—a fusion of dream pop and reggaeton rhythms. Their 2018 album Prisma Tropical marked a milestone, combining traditional Puerto Rican instruments like the tiple and bomba barrel drum with dembow beats and electronic synths. The album was widely praised, landing on NPR’s Top 50 Albums and Rolling Stone’s Top 10 Latin Albums of the year.
Roomful of Teeth
Roomful of Teeth is a two-time Grammy Award-winning vocal group dedicated to reimagining the expressive potential of the human voice. By engaging collaboratively with artists, thinkers, and community leaders from around the world, the group seeks to uplift and amplify voices old and new while creating and performing meaningful and adventurous music using a continuously expanding vocabulary of singing techniques.
Six Nations: One Fire (working title)
Vickie Ramirez, Ty Defoe, Jeanette Harrison
This new performance blends text, movement, and song to explore the timeless wisdom of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s Great Law of Peace, its relevance to modern democracy, and its historical impact both within the Confederacy and on the United States. For over a thousand years, the Great Law has guided the Six Nations, fostering unity, justice, and consensus-based decision-making—offering valuable lessons for today’s world. This Indigenous framework influenced the thinking of colonists as they drafted the foundational documents of the fledgling United States. At a time when democracy faces challenges of division and distrust, the Great Law of Peace provides a profound model for fostering unity and equity. More than just a performance, it is an artistic journey that asks how Haudenosaunee governance principles can inspire a more just and inclusive future for all.
Vickie Ramirez
Vickie Ramirez (Tuscarora) is a New York City-based playwright, screenwriter, and director whose work has been seen at Native Voices at the Autry, Roundabout Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, and La Jolla Playhouse. She has collaborated with artists like Colman Domingo, Lily Gladstone, and Raúl Castillo. The first Indigenous member of the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group (2009) and New Dramatists (2018), Vickie is currently adapting Standoff at Highway 37 into a feature film and Pure Native into a TV series. Her plays are published by Broadway Play Publishing, TRW, and Routledge Books.
Ty Defoe
Ty Defoe (giizhig) is a citizen of the Anishinaabe and Oneida Nation and is a Grammy Award-winning interdisciplinary artist and writer. As a sovereign story trickster, Ty has earned fellowships from Robert Rauschenberg, MacDowell, Sundance, and Kennedy Center’s Next 50. Ty creates work with rural communities, Broadway productions, and in the metaverse, fostering relations for Indigenous and decolonial futures. Publications: Casting a Movement, Thorny Locust, and Routledge Press. Co-founder of Indigenous Direction (with Larissa FastHorse). Ty is a professor of practice at ASU’s Medieval and Renaissance Studies and a writer-in-residence at PACE in NYC. he/we/ty @ tydefoe.com | allmyrelations.earth
Jeanette Harrison
Jeanette Harrison is a director, writer, actor, and producer; co-founder of AlterTheater, which she led for 17 years; and creative director for Native Theater Project, in residence at Bag&Baggage Productions. Broadway: associate director for The Thanksgiving Play by Larissa FastHorse (dir: Rachel Chavkin). In 2019, she was part of the inaugural Native Animation Lab with LA Skins Fest, where she developed and later wrote Little Drummer Girl.
Sovereignty Hymns
Abigail Nessen Bengson and The Bengsons
Sovereignty Hymns is a live cantata and communal storytelling experience celebrating and honoring body sovereignty, created by The Bengsons. In form, it will be a series of sung testimonies drawn from interviews with people whose lives have been impacted by abortion, performed with local choirs in theaters, churches, and other sites of gathering across the country. Rather than a performance an audience comes to watch, it is something a community comes to do. Surrounding the cantata, we will create a space for shared storytelling about the myriad of ways we hold our bodies sovereign, including our right to safety, our right to medical care, and our right to physical freedom.
Our provocation is that reproductive freedom is about all of us. We believe that body sovereignty is a core tenet of democracy, and something that we each hold. We do not accept that it can be given, taken away, or negotiated. And yet throughout the course of American history our rights to our own bodies have been the subject of debate. Sovereignty Hymns is an invitation to feel the sanctity of choice, and a joyful and insistent prayer that our choices be honored by those in power and those we love.
The Bengsons
Abigail and Shaun Bengson are a married composing and performing duo raising two children in NYC and Vermont. They believe grief and joy are the same thing. They are interested in anything that gets us all free. The Bengsons’ theater work includes The Keep Going Songs (LCT3), Oh Courage (The Joyce, international tour), The Keep Going Song (Actors Theatre of Louisville), My Joy is Heavy (Arena Stage), Hundred Days (La Jolla Playhouse, New York Theatre Workshop, US Tour), The Lucky Ones (Ars Nova), Where the Mountain Meets the Sea (ATL’s Humana Festival; Manhattan Theatre Club), Anything That Gives Off Light (Edinburgh Theatre Festival, US tour), Hurricane Diane (Two River, NYTW), You’ll Still Call Me By Name (New York Live Arts, Jacob’s Pillow), Sundown Yellow Moon (WP Theater) and Iphigenia in Aulis (Classic Stage Company). They have received the Jonathan Larson and Richard Rodgers Awards and nominations for the Drama Desk, Drama League, and Lucille Lortel Awards and are proud to be NYTW Usual Suspects.
Photo: Jenny Anderson
The Truth Beneath
Talvin Wilks and Paul Schiff Berman
The Truth Beneath, conceived and created by Paul Schiff Berman and Talvin Wilks, is a time-shifting fractured narrative about memory, politics, social media, and disinformation’s effect on a functioning democracy based on Maria Ressa’s dramatic personal memoir, How to Stand Up to a Dictator. It is created in consultation with Ressa, co-founder of the Philippines journalism site Rappler and 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner. By navigating her personal journey in relation to the Philippines, her efforts to “hold the line” in an environment of political spin, social media amplification and abuse, creeping authoritarianism, and their potential for dismantling democracy, we are able to explore and discover what is most important to the future of democracy in the United States and the world. As Ressa repeatedly insists, what happens in the Philippines later happens in the West, The Truth Beneath explores crucial contemporary questions through a collage of multi-sourced texts, complex visual tableaus, a quickly shifting sound score, and multilayered video imagery that together construct a rich and disorienting theatrical world where reality is endlessly fractured, and deceit and violence are ever-present. The Truth Beneath seeks to be an experiential and explosive expose, a living document that also interrogates its own understanding of truth.
Talvin Wilks
Talvin Wilks is a playwright, director, and dramaturg based in Minneapolis and New York City. His plays include Tod, the boy, Tod, The Trial of Uncle S&M, Bread of Heaven, An American Triptych, Jimmy and Lorraine: A Musing, and As I Remember It with Carmen de Lavallade. He served as a co-writer/co-director for Ping Chong’s ongoing series of Undesirable Elements and Collidescope: Adventures in Pre- and Post-Racial America, and is a member of the Ping Chong + Co. Artistic Leadership Team. Directing credits: The White Card, This Bitter Earth, Benevolence, The Ballad of Emmett Till (Penumbra Theatre), The Peculiar Patriot (National Black Theatre/Woolly Mammoth), Parks (History Theatre), Cannabis: A Viper Vaudeville (HERE Arts/La Mama), Snakehips in Our DNA (The Apollo/Jacob’s Pillow), and The Till Trilogy (Mosaic Theatre). Dramaturgy credits: for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enough (2022 Broadway Revival), Dreaming Zenzile (New York Theatre Workshop/National Black Theatre), An American Tail (Children’s Theatre Company), Between the World and Me (The Apollo), Scat!, Walkin’ with ‘Trane, Haint Blu (Urban Bush Women), ink, Black Girl: Linguistic Play, Mr. TOL E. RanCE (Camille A. Brown and Dancers), In a Rhythm, A History, Necessary Beauty, Landing-Place, Verge (Bebe Miller Company), Radicals in Miniature, Relics and Their Humans (Ain Gordon/Pick Up Performance Co.). He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance, University of Minnesota/Twin Cities, and a recipient of the 2020 McKnight Theater Artist Fellowship and the 2022 McKnight Presidential Fellowship.
Photo: Caroline Yang
Paul Schiff Berman
Paul Schiff Berman was a founder and co-Artistic Director of The Spin Lab and later Spin Theater, theater companies that operated from 1988-1995, creating original theater work at The Performing Garage and at St. Mark’s Church in New York as well as on tour. For those companies, he directed The Trial of Uncle S&M, The Richard Foreman Trilogy (cited by the American Theater Wing for outstanding theatrical design), White Water, Three Years She Grew, and Horses. Berman also served for many years as Administrative Director of The Wooster Group and remains on the Board of Directors of the company. He has been a guest lecturer in theater at Princeton University the University of the Philippines, and Northeastern University. Outside of theater, Berman is currently the Walter S. Cox Professor of Law at The George Washington University. He has been the Dean of two law schools and also served as GW’s Vice Provost for Online Education and Academic Innovation. He is a graduate, summa cum laude, of Princeton University, and earned his JD from NYU Law School, where he won the University Graduation Prize. Prior to academia, he served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.