Democracy is not merely a constitutional architecture but a fragile choreography of bodies, voices, exclusions, and acts of collective imagination. This proposed work approaches the democratic condition as a performative field in which citizenship is continually rehearsed, contested, and reconfigured. Through theatre, movement, sound, and participatory dramaturgy, the project examines how individuals become political subjects: by speaking, listening, refusing, assembling, mourning, voting, migrating, and remembering. Its central proposition is that democracy in the United States can be understood not only through institutions, but through the civic gestures that sustain or corrode them. Drawing on town halls, protest chants, courtroom testimony, electoral rituals, and domestic conversations, the piece transforms familiar democratic practices into heightened theatrical encounters. A specific case study emerges from the tension between constitutional promise and lived disenfranchisement: the American polling place as both sacred civic threshold and site of historical obstruction. By juxtaposing archival fragments with contemporary embodied testimony, the work reveals how access to democratic participation remains unevenly distributed across race, class, language, and geography. From a Madrid-based perspective, the project further refracts American democracy through transatlantic memory, asking how its crises resonate beyond national borders. Ultimately, the work proposes performance as a civic laboratory: a space where spectators do not simply observe democracy, but temporarily inhabit its demands, contradictions, and unfinished possibilities.
