PORTLAND, Maine — Sitting outside a city coffee shop last week, Sara Juli sipped peppermint tea and chatted about “Naughty Bits,” which she’s getting ready to put on stage in Rockland next month.
But don’t get the wrong idea. The Falmouth-based performance artist, whose interwoven dance, song, story and comedy pieces have appeared on stages from Maine to Edinburgh, Scotland, isn’t about to do anything scandalous.
Instead, Juli’s newest “bit” explores her two childhood sexual assaults and how their trauma affected her life for decades afterward with lingering guilt about what she erroneously believed was her own “naughty” behavior.
The Strand Theatre in Rockland commissioned “Naughty Bits” as part of its New Century Series of original works. It will premiere Friday, Oct. 13 at 7 p.m. A panel discussion with representatives from domestic violence resource organization New Hope Midcoast will follow the performance.
Juli said she understands the title of her show could be misleading, but she’s OK with that.
“I chose it intentionally to be provocative, even though there’s nothing provocative about sexual assaults,” Juli said. “But that’s exactly the dichotomy that I’m shooting for and I learned a long time ago, as a solo performance artist, when you have provocative titles, it helps.”
Even though the topic is heavy and personal, the show isn’t. She doesn’t reenact or relive her trauma on stage. Instead, she literally dances around the subject, relating interactive, tangential stories meant to elevate her personal experience picking apart the concept of naughtiness.
“When I was a little girl and experienced sexual assault, I didn’t know how to tend to my mind,” Juli said. “I just decided I had been naughty — even though I had done nothing wrong.”
Those feelings later led to what Juli described as promiscuity throughout her 20s and 30s, as she unconsciously tried to prove her own naughtiness. She dealt with that behavior in a previous show, and now she’s now ready to tackle the concept of naughtiness and how it doesn’t actually exist.
“Nobody is naughty. I wasn’t being naughty,” Juli said. “I was somebody who was manifesting their trauma. You can always draw a direct connection between sexual assault survivors and promiscuous behavior. That’s not naughty. There’s nothing naughty about any of that.”
Like her previous personal work, Juli said devising this one over the past few years has been therapeutic. Embedded in the show are two triggering events which normally drag her back to the moments of her assaults. In repeatedly rehearsing and refining these onstage events for “Naughty Bits,” she’s begun to take their power away.
“I’m now in control because I put them in the dance,” Juli said. “When I first started to rehearse them, I’d have to stop. I’d have to cry. And now I’ve gotten to a place where I can see that, I’m so close to the other side.”
Though not explicitly pointed out as triggers in the show, Juli thinks the audience will probably recognize one of them but not the other.
Working out her personal problems is always the beginning of Juli’s pieces before she makes them universal, as well. Besides the piece about promiscuity, Juli has also previously tackled subjects including her father’s death, postpartum depression and a show called “Burnt Out Wife” which dealt with the challenges of marriage and long-term partnerships.
“I don’t do light topics,” she said. “And whatever is bothering me is bothering several million other people simultaneously.”
The topics may be heavy, but Juli’s shows include healthy doses of over-the-top comedy. Her previous show saw her doing bits of standup comedy, talking into a hairbrush while wearing a poofy dressing gown. Later in the same show, Juli sat in a bathtub, singing a song about how her husband would do anything for her, but only in a bathtub.
Pairing humor with heavy topics is part of Juli’s strategy for keeping her intense performances watchable, enjoyable and accessible. That strategy started when she was a child. Juli would knock on neighbor’s doors and, when they answered, she’d hit play on a boombox, then perform impromptu dances to Janet Jackson songs.
“I figured out that I have a gift. I’m able to share really personal information in a very public way, which is not easy, but I can do it,” Juli said. “Not only does it open up my own loneliness, shame, and embarrassment, it allows them to access their shame, loneliness, embarrassment. Then we can heal together.”