Sara Juli's Midseason Mood & Gay Aesthetic: Based on a True Story at The Dance Complex

Dance-theater comedic artists Sara Juli & Alexander Davis perform their solos on a shared bill (in the conservatory with the candlestick).

About Sara Juli's Midseason Mood:

As women's autonomy faces unprecedented threats, Sara Juli's work-in-progress "Midseason Mood " blends stand-up comedy and dance-theater to reclaim what culture tries to erase: our power, our pleasure, our resilience. Set to Max Richter's reimagining of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, this is a woman in a midlife mood to kick some ass.

Sara Juli's newest solo is a 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. The work centers women in midlife finding agency in a culture that renders aging women invisible. Through the integration of stand-up comedy with choreographed and improvised movement, Sara mines the connectivity of the female experience at midlife—the 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."

About "Gay Aesthetic" & Alexander Davis:

In 2024, Alexander Davis was invited to join a prestigious dance project with one condition: would he be "willing to lose weight in order to fit the gay aesthetic of the work." Alex declined the job but embraced the experience as creative fuel for his newest solo. Gay Aesthetic: Based on a True Story is a 45-minute dance-theater work that excavates the history of queer aesthetics, survival tools, and the painful reality of discrimination within our own community. Drawing from Hal Fischer's pioneering Gay Semiotics research, hanky codes, vintage physique photography, and contemporary queer scholarship, this piece blends lecture and movement into what some critics have called "an unearned and over-dramatic existential crisis."

The work asks urgent questions: How has gossip functioned as community support? Is cruising essential to queer survival? Why does he love Gabby Windey but not Colton Underwood? Is that internalized homophobia? Misogyny? Both? Created with writer/director Jeremy Brothers and featuring an original hyperpop score composed and performed by musician Tyler Leif, Gay Aesthetic was developed through residency support from the Samuel H. Scripps Studios and the American Dance Festival, where it premiered in December 2025.