BY ADRIANA POPA

In print | Published October 30, 2008

Last Friday, the queer performance artist, Sara Felder, electrified Hillel’s usually subdued Shabbat service with her arsenal of juggling props. Bond Hall proved too small for Sara Felder’s explosive personality and dynamic one-woman show. In her performance—a part of Coming Out Week—Felder explored issues of spirituality through art and humor, disarming the audience with her engaging introduction: “My name is Sara Felder and I am a Jew for juggling.”

Felder began performing in 1984 with San Francisco’s Pickle Family Circus. She has also toured with Jugglers for Peace in Cuba, the Women’s Circus in Nicaragua and Joel Grey’s Borscht Capades in addition to participating in Jewish and Yiddish cultural festivals in Amsterdam, New York, Los Angeles and Toronto. Felder views juggling as a medium for conveying her creative vision, engaging with others and promoting social justice. While Felder has experimented with numerous performance arts, she insists that juggling is her true passion. “Juggling is my love. It’s how I entered theater, it’s how everything started.”

For almost an hour, Sara Felder used juggling, acting and dancing to explore the sometimes humorous complications of simultaneous membership in two marginal groups: the queer community and the Jewish community. With her spontaneous sense of humor, Felder was able to salvage the few failed tricks. She quickly won over the crowd despite her visible nervousness with self-deprecating commentary. “Thank you, but you don’t need to applaud when I drop them. I don’t need your pity,” Felder said after a botched trick.

The artist also engaged her audience with occasionally provocative statements. After a question-answer round, she observed, “You know, you’re not very pretty, but you’re very smart!” Incorporating the audience’s reaction is one of Felder’s signature tactics. “In solo performance, the audience is the other performer. I try to make the people feel comfortable and willing to participate by amusing and surprising them.” This performance demonstrated the effectiveness of the strategy, as participants veered left and right to avoid being showered with water after Felder’s lively interpretation of Sholom Asch’s “God of Vengeance” using Barbie dolls.

Sara Felder does not shy away from controversy. Her body of work, including radical solo circus theater and witty multi-actor plays, explores politically and socially contentious issues. Despite the heightened visibility of her views under the spotlight of her developing career, Felder has remained faithful to her convictions while using humor to make controversial issues accessible to a diverse audience. The themes of her plays and performances are serious, but the form is comic, engaging and even vaudevillian. Speaking about the intentional role of humor in art, Sara Felder shed light on the difficult task of approaching controversial issues. “Religion, sexuality, politics … Art can give you a window into all that. And it’s fun, you know. It’s not a lecture,” Felder said.

The audience’s reaction to Felder’s performance was overwhelmingly positive. Maki Somoset ’12 was initially confused by the unconventional format of the performance, but eventually came around to Felder’s unique sense of humor and style. “I underestimated it at first, but in the end I was definitely won over by the quirkiness.”

The content of Felder’s performances is heavily informed by her personal experiences. “Things I’ve lived, things I’ve felt, things that are important to me … I use that in my shows because it gives my performance authenticity,” Felder said. Reflecting on her experience with queer theater in Israel—where the Jewish community comprises a majority—she alluded to the challenges that Jews have historically encountered in the United States and elsewhere. Felder said that she has felt marginalized at various points in her career, when it has been difficult to convey the challenges faced by minority communities to a mainstream audience. “It’s always a challenge to manage to have a mainstream career. Most of the material was written for mainstream theater.” Many of Felder’s jokes feature Jewish or queer references and can seem obscure or inaccessible to people who do not belong to one of these groups.

William Lin ‘12, recently read an excerpt from the author’s most recent book and was therefore more attuned to her performance style. “I didn’t catch all the references or get all the jokes, but it didn’t really matter because she was entertaining in so many different ways. How can you not find a clever reading of ‘One Dyke Two Dyke Red Dyke Blue Dyke’ funny?”

Felder is enthusiastic about her upcoming projects, including a play that she is currently writing for the Philadelphia Theater Initiative. Entitled “Melancholy, a comedy,” the play will explore the issue of mental illness.

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