World Premiere TBD

Work in Progress Showing March 21-22, 2026

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“Sara Juli’s Midseason” is an evening-length dance-theater comedy exploring midlife, a time that stretches well past halfway when you're no longer emerging but suspended in the messy abundance of reflection. This solo work centers women in midlife finding agency in a culture that renders aging women invisible. Set to Max Richter's recomposition of Vivaldi's “The Four Seasons”, this work reimagines these iconic male-created compositions through a middle-aged woman's lens.  It reclaims pleasure as resistance, asking what happens when we stop apologizing for our desires, our changing bodies, our refusal to be quiet or invisible.

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"We are instantly bonded with Juli, as her magnetic person pulls us in."

- Amy Munice, Picturethispost.com

Commissioned by The Strand Theatre in Rockland, ME through their New Century Series Program

World Premiere 

Oct 13-14, 2023

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Naughty Bits is a dance-play set inside Juli’s memories that examines trauma while finding levity within the tragic. Using movement, text, digital projections, comedy

and a capella renditions of 1980’s iconic male-led songs, Naughty Bits finds the forgotten bits, funny bits (and wobbly bits) of reclaiming one’s body and mind.

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“Sara Juli has proven herself to be a master of using humor to examine subjects that are uncomfortable and not at all comic.”

- Jessica Lockhart, The Arts Fuse

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Co-commissioned by SPACE and Portland Ovations

World Premiere October 17-19, 2019

Portland, ME

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Burnt-Out Wife explores the decay and detritus of a once-promising marriage. Separation, sex deprivation, and lack of communication add up to wanting to run from the popular, yet impossible binding contract. Using her comedic text-driven dance style, Sara Juli blows up marriage. Original Costume by Carol Farrell, Set Design by Pamela Moulton, Dramaturgy by Michelle Mola and Lighting Design by Justin Moriarty.

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"She turns her hideous bathroom into a throne room worthy of pissed-as-hell royalty."

- InfiniteBody

Premiered at SPACE Gallery

Portland, ME

October 23rd & 24th, 2015

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Tense Vagina: an actual diagnosis is about motherhood- its beauty, challenges, isolation, comedy and influence on the human experience. This evening-length solo uses humor, movement, sounds, songs, text and audience participation to reveal “all that is awesome and all that sucks” when it comes to being a mother.

 

"She had the audience laughing out loud as she lay bare her personal secrets." 

- The Portland Press Herald, Portland, ME

Created and performed with Claire Porter

Commissioned by American Dance Festival

Durham, NC

June 20 & 21, 2017

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Using movement, text, sound, song, and a catwalk runway, acclaimed comedic performers, Claire Porter and Sara Juli, upend our day-to-day, necessary-to-survive, rule-rituals in The Lectern, and find the hilarious in the rule-bending of our daily lives. 

 

"The piece maintains it’s comedic high throughout, as the women enact etiquette lessons and lecture us on proper manners. Porter and Juli are a hilarious, dynamic pair." - The Dance Enthusiast

Created and performed with Claire Porter
Premiered at American Dance Theater

Durham, NC

2015

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Two friends in big dresses tell, retell and tell again, small stories about little events with big impacts. Music by Gioachino Rossini and Giacomo Puccini sung by Luciano Pavarotti.

 

"Whether detailing anxieties over a job interview or the frustrations of motherhood, the two had delightfully funny characterizations and zany senses of physical comedy"

- The News & Observer, Durham, NC

Commissioned by Performance Space 122

New York, NY

2008

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Death, a dance-theater piece that addresses the taboo topic of death.  After losing her father tragically to cancer, Juli experienced first-hand our culture’s inability to deal with death.  She was amazed that something inevitable was so uncomfortable for people who, in particular, seemed to struggle to find the right thing to say and do.  In this 50-minute solo performance, Juli uses movement, text, song, gesture, sounds, humor and audience interaction to present a reflection on the awkwardness of death. 

Commissioned by American Dance Festival

Durham, NC

2006

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Liar. Gossip. Hypocrite. Sara Juli reveals insider information about the administration of the arts in her “latest permutation of words caught in her throat” (Gay City News) and the movement that follows. Deep Throat reveals the gossip behind the girl. Juli, “…a light of the downtown dance and theatre scene” (New Yorker), in her newest solo Deep Throat fusing movement, text and song to expose the humor and danger in leaking information to others.

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“A Dance Comic” - Durham Herald-Sun, NC

Commissioned by Performance Space 122

New York, NY

2006

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If you risk losing everything, you stand to gain so much more in return.  In her riskiest piece ever, Sara cashes-out her entire savings account of $5,000 and gives it away to audience members as a way to overcome her “money issues”.  

 

“A Truly Generous Performance… Onstage Sara Juli gives of herself.  And her bank account”

- The New York Times

Premiered at The Bushwick Starr

New York, NY

2004

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Is she an artist if she spends so little time making art?  The character faces her fear of being an artist.  Lighting by Jay Maury. 

 

“Shadow Artist has good bones…Her fearless audience intrusions are different interactions each time and give the piece much of its edgy immediacy and comic brilliance”

- offoffoff.com, New York, NY

Premiered at Williamsburg Arts Nexus

Brooklyn, NY

2003

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This piece is the reconciliation of a promiscuous past using movement, text and song. Costume by Roxana Ramseur and Lighting by Jeremy Morris.  

 

“In her pomo vaudeville monologue How to Forgive Yourself in Bed, Juli casts herself as a zaftig, ebullient beauty in a raucously sequined swim suit who has “promiscuity issues”…its nerve is undeniable”

- The Village Voice, New York, NY

Premiered at Ontological-Hysteric Theater 

New York, NY

2003

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On her grandmother’s deathbed, Sara promised she would marry a Jewish man.  Burden is the letting go of that promise as the character faces her true love for a non-Jew, and her realization that she must leave her Holocaust past behind in order to live her own life. 

 

“…some of the summer’s best work happened far from an ADF mainstage…Sara Juli’s engaging, experimental dance theater solo, Burden”

- Independent Weekly, Durham, NC

Premiered at Dixon Place

New York, NY 

2002

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Voted Best of Dance 2003 by the Independent Weekly, this work was created with the notion that, as emotional beings, our psyches are comprised of hundreds of “parts”.

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“…a humerous, hyper-critical play-by-play commentary on the moves she made while making them, before arm and upper body gestures ultimately suggested that reaching for perfection is a lot like reaching for the moon” - Independent Weekly, Durham, NC

Premiered at Dixon Place

New York, NY

2001

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This piece marks Sara’s first dance that uses her self-developed movement-theater vocabulary.  With anger as its main theme, this work provides a platform for the character’s rage.  

 

“…quintessential angry naked dance that everyone must have in their repertory”

- Gay City News, New York, NY