“Calling Sara Felder a juggler is a little like referring to Michelangelo as that guy who painted ceilings.”

Bay Area Reporter

Biography

Sara Felder is a solo theater artist, playwright and juggler.  While the themes of her plays and performances are serious, her form is comic, engaging, vaudevillian.  She strives to integrate personal experiences with the urgency of this moment in history.  Out of that mix she creates funny and provocative theater.  

Sara began performing in 1984 with San Franciso’s Pickle Family Circus.  She has also toured with Jugglers for Peace in Cuba, the Women’s Circus in Nicaragua, Joel Grey’s Borscht Capades and at Festivals of Jewish/Yiddish Culture in Berlin, London, Amsterdam, New York, Los Angeles and Toronto.  Through juggling, she has been able to find her theatrical voice, create compelling performance, teach alternative populations and pursue social justice.   

Sara’s body of work, including radical solo circus theater and witty multi-actor plays, explores political and social frictions: a lone cellist playing defiantly on the war-ravaged streets of Sarajevo; the scientists who – in a gargantuan effort to save the world from Hitler – ended up making the bombs that annihilated the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; a gender-bending cross-dressing 19th-century vaudevillian; two urban neighbors who confront racism; victims of radioactive fallout from U.S. nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands; and women named Joan.

Sara’s solo plays that are currently touring include the brand new “A Queer Divine” which explores the complexity of faith, the choreography of grief and a trip to the ballet.  “Melancholy, A Comedy” centers on American icon Abraham Lincoln in order to investigate mental illness and depression.  The very successful and provocative “Out of Sight” uses the relationship between a blind mother and her adult daughter to examine invisibility, family loyalties and the Israel/Palestine conflict.  The highly-acclaimed “June Bride” tells the story of a traditional Jewish lesbian wedding.  In its hundreds of performances of the last 13 years, “June Bride” has become part of the grass-roots effort to keep same-sex marriage on the national agenda and has given audiences a way to talk about this controversial issue.

Sara has received fellowships in performance from the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts and the Independence Foundation.  She has been awarded the Philadelphia Theatre Initiative three times.  She also earned the Leeway Transformation Award for her body of work committed to art and social change.  (here, please continue from the original text till the end: “She has been an artist-in residence at Intersection for the Arts….She is on the roster of PennPAT:  Pennsylvania Artists on Tour.)