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As women's autonomy faces unprecedented threats, Maine-based performance artist Sara Juli's new evening-length work, Midseason, fuses dance-theatre with stand-up comedy to celebrate aging women's resistance, resilience, and refusal to disappear. Centering women in midlife finding agency in a culture that renders them invisible, the work asks what happens when we stop apologizing for our desires, our changing bodies, our refusal to be quiet. Set to Max Richter's recomposition of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, Juli reimagines iconic male-created compositions through the lens of a middle-aged woman— mining the female experience at midlife, reclaiming agency and pleasure as power.

Sara Juli's repertoire takes deeply personal topics and uses humor as a portal to say something deeper, ultimately connecting with audiences on perspectives of the human experience. Midseason continues and deepens her singular expressive vocabulary: a seamless integration of movement, text, sound, song, audience interaction, and humor. Often billed as a "dance comic," this new work explores dance within a stand-up comedy structure: microphone, direct audience address, and joke-telling, integrated with choreographed and improvised movement and text. The final work will also include a sculptural set, the music of Max Richter's The Four Seasons recomposed, and original lighting and costume design, marking Juli's first collaboration with a sound designer working live on stage, amplifying and manipulating her voice in real time.

The urgency is this: we are living through an era of unprecedented attacks on women's autonomy, from reproductive rights being stripped away to the political erasure of women over 40 from positions of power and cultural visibility. At the same time, conversations about menopause and aging female bodies remain taboo, treated as decline rather than transformation. Midseason directly confronts this moment by insisting that women at midlife are not disappearing. We're done with self-sabotage and polite silence. Through movement, text, sound, and stand-up, I mine the female experience at midlife: yearning for intimacy, the dangers of productivity as virtue, the vulnerability required to be kind to yourself rather than punitive, and the radical act of saying "you are enough." This work is necessary because women need to see themselves reflected — vibrant, angry, joyful, sexual, powerful — at midlife.