What would it mean to take live performance seriously as a site of democratic practice—as a mode of doing politics? This is the question behind Emily Beausoleil’s Staging Democracy: The Political Work of Live Performance. The book challenges democratic theory to move beyond rationalist, deliberative, and procedural models to take seriously the affective, embodied, and ephemeral dynamics of performance as modes of democratic engagement. Working from within political science, Beausoleil develops a conceptual vocabulary drawn partly from performance studies to argue that theatre and live art can do more than represent democracy—they can enact what should be its most vital practices: care for difference, vulnerability, listening, and shared risk. Coming to the book from within performance studies (where questions of politics, affect, and representation have long shaped both the field and my own research) I read Staging Democracy as a valuable reversal of the disciplinary gaze. While its conceptual moves will be familiar to performance scholars, the book’s distinctive contribution lies in its reframing of these insights for democratic theory—urging political scientists to take seriously the civic and critical work of live performance.

At the core of Staging Democracy is a deliberate reimagining of democratic practice, one that privileges a “care for difference” (p. 4)—a form of openness that critically engages with otherness while allowing one’s own interpretive frameworks to be unsettled and reshaped through the encounter—and a “receptive generosity” (p. 5), defined as being both agonistically receptive and critically attuned by sustaining respectful engagement with known differences while remaining open to emergent ones. These orientations, Beausoleil contends, are poorly served by procedural or deliberative models of democracy. She turns instead to the embodied, affective capacities of live performance as a generative site for cultivating democratic responsiveness across difference. Performances, in this account, function as sites of affective democratic practice in their own right, not merely as acts of protest, politically minded projects, or cultural reflections on political happenings.

This reconceptualization is most clearly articulated in chapter two, where Beausoleil develops her critique of what she calls the “literal voice” (p. 16)—a dominant liberal-democratic ideal of political subjectivity. Drawing on theorists such as Gayatri Spivak and Judith Butler, she argues that the liberal-democratic ideal of being “heard” in the public sphere often demands marginalized identities conform to prevailing cisheteronormative, male, educated, institutional, or colonial norms. The literal voice—whether academic, political, or imperial—reinforces exclusionary dynamics by presuming a level playing field. In contrast, she proposes that the polyphonic, affective, and formally unstable qualities of performance—or, put differently, its messiness—enable “democratic encounters that enact a care for difference and foster receptive generosity” (p. 29).

Chapters three to five offer detailed analyses of three performance case studies that ground Beausoleil’s conceptual framework in specific political and cultural contexts. Each is the result of original fieldwork or archival research and presents cases that have received limited attention in peer-reviewed scholarship. Chapter three examines how South African companies such as Workshop’71 mobilized performance under apartheid as a mode of political engagement. Beausoleil shows how these groups evaded censorship—in part through the apartheid state’s failure to recognize theater as politically consequential—and enabled performances to “function as crucial organizing and conscientizing sites” (pp. 50–51) that could “model and cultivate the conditions for a democratic politics” (p. 54) outside of state control. Chapter four turns to after homelessness… (2009), a participatory theater project based in Vancouver, Canada, led by David Diamond and rooted in his adaptation of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (1973). Involving 22 people with lived experience of homelessness, the project sought to foster dialogue on the structural causes of housing insecurity and to explore possibilities for systemic change. Beausoleil highlights the liminality and polyphony of forum theater in enabling such conversations while also acknowledging the ethical tensions involved in working with vulnerable participants. Chapter five analyses Captain Cook Thinks Again (2019), a promenade clown performance by Barbarian Productions in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, which uses humor to engage Pākehā audiences with the legacies of settler colonialism. In this, the clown persona renders colonial logics absurd—creating space for critical reflection without provoking immediate defensiveness. But as the performance transitions from the comic persona to personal vulnerability, the shifting performance of Cook models the discomfort, openness, and reflexivity that Beausoleil argues are essential to democratic responsiveness in settler colonial formations. Across these diverse contexts, Beausoleil demonstrates how live performance can rehearse, test, and produce affective democratic encounters.

Chapter six returns to and complicates the book’s earlier claims. Beausoleil offers a reflective assessment of the conditions under which performance might function as a democratic practice—enabling disorientation, unfamiliar forms of listening, and encounters across difference that resist resolution. She emphasizes the risks of instrumentalizing the arts or reducing them to vehicles for catharsis or entertainment, sharpening her claims by directly addressing the ethical and aesthetic tensions that attend such work. Crucially, she insists that performance, even when participatory, is not inherently democratic. What emerges is a grounded and disciplined defense of the performing arts as a contingent space in which democratic responsiveness can be explored.

While Staging Democracy makes a valuable interdisciplinary intervention, particularly in translating the affective and relational vocabulary of performance studies into the lexicon of democratic theory, its core conceptual argument raises several critical questions. Beausoleil’s emphasis on care for difference and receptive generosity as democratic virtues foregrounds the emotional and ethical dimensions of encounter, but leaves underexamined how such affective states relate to material structures, institutional constraints, or long-term political organization. The claim that the “distinct dynamics and effects” of performance can be “legitimate and effective sites of democratic politics in their own right, capable of fostering and enacting forms of engagement across difference and inequality” (p. 15) is compelling but risks conflating esthetic experience with political efficacy. Beausoleil positions democracy less as a contested political formation than as a set of ethical orientations—grounded in listening, care, and relational risk. This framing aligns with agonistic and affective turns in democratic theory, yet it abstracts democracy from the institutional and structural conditions and constraints that shape political possibility. As a result, the analysis has limited traction on forms of coercive power that resist Beausoleil’s framing—the kinds of forces with which both protest movements and postcolonial critiques contend. A more sustained engagement with these tensions would have deepened the book’s analytic reach.

Similarly, while the three case studies are individually rich, the book stops short of drawing comparative insights across them. The methodological and political differences between South African protest theater under apartheid, participatory forum work in Canada, and promenade clowning in settler-colonial Aotearoa New Zealand are striking—yet the book stops short of theorizing how their divergent formal and political logics might productively complicate its central claims. For scholars within performance studies, the conceptual claims may feel broadly familiar. Foundational debates around form, spectatorship, or the politics of liveness are largely bypassed, and the analysis tends to privilege affective openness over dramaturgical specificity. Beausoleil draws selectively on key figures—including Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Baz Kershaw, and Richard Schechner—whose work has long advanced the idea that performance can function as discursive, affective, and ethically charged political practice. Yet, the book engages this literature more as provocation than as dialogue. This does not diminish the book’s force, but it does mean that its most distinctive contribution is disciplinary redirection rather than conceptual innovation.

Nonetheless, Staging Democracy offers an important redirection for political scientists seeking to reconceptualize democratic practice beyond procedural liberalism. Scholars and practitioners of community-engaged performance will also find its commitment to ethical practice—particularly in Chapter four—both thoughtful and useable. Beausoleil does not advance a new theory of political performance so much as issue a compelling provocation to take live performance seriously as a generative mode of civic practice. Her conceptual dismantling of the literal voice—through attention to the liminal, polyphonic, and unsettled dynamics of performance—marks a distinctive intervention, especially in traditions that have marginalized such forms. Staging Democracy articulates a pressing case for the civic stakes of performance in contexts where formal politics fails to accommodate difference—and, in doing so, makes a valuable contribution to democratic thought.