Sara Juli has spent her career making art about her own life. Her performances have explored her relationship with money, her experience with postpartum depression, and the challenges in her marriage. She and her husband even had an on-stage therapy session after a show.

But she had two stories in her past that still felt too personal. Juli had twice experienced sexual assault, once as a child and again as a young woman.

“I could see how negatively impactful these two experience have been for me,” Juli said. “I hadn’t done the work that I needed to do to really deal with them. So that’s usually my indicator that I need to make a dance about it, when something is plaguing me and I can’t get past it. The signs were there, and I decide to dig in.”

Two years later, Juli will premiere “Naughty Bits” on Friday and Saturday at the Strand Theatre in Rockland. The performance will explore her sexual trauma with both seriousness and Juli’s signature humor. The show is part play and part dance, a mix of monologue and singing and stand-up comedy. Juli, who lives in Falmouth, said the process has been the hardest of her career, and also healing.

“I feel so ready to premiere this piece,” she said.

To develop “Naughty Bits,” Juli unearthed a childhood diary her parents gave her after the first assault, and a journal she was keeping at the time of the second in her 20s. Those pages have been incorporated into a projection design and illustrations that will be the backdrop for “Naughty Bits.”

But important to Juli is the fact that she never shares the specific details of those two experiences with the audience. She hopes those gaps make room for the audience to fill in their own experiences and find their own healing.

“I’m creating space through the abstraction so that you can insert your own narrative,” she said. “I don’t want to tell my story from beginning to end because my story isn’t your story. But I bet you have experienced some form of trauma in your own life.”

Juli incorporated her own triggers into “Naughty Bits,” words that used to take her back to those terrible moments and had the power to derail her day.

“I no longer gave agency to my perpetrator where I was thinking about him,” she said. “I was thinking about the piece. I’ve literally changed my mind through the art. Every time I perform it, I feel like I’m continuing to shift, and I’m continuing to grow, and I’m continuing to heal.”

The Strand Theatre commissioned “Naughty Bits” as part of its New Century Series, a two-year project dedicated to experimenting with new work and artists. As part of that collaboration, Juli has done two work-in-progress performances at the theater during the past year. Additional support came from the Maine Arts Commission, the American Rescue Plan Maine Project Grants administered by Space in Portland, and the New England Foundation for the Arts’ New England Dance Fund.

Jessie Davis, executive director of the Strand Theatre, said she has been struck by Juli’s willingness to allow her audience to glimpse into the artistic process and give feedback after those shows. “Naughty Bits” strikes a balance between the hard stuff and the humor, Davis said.

“She’s really conscientious about the need for an audience to experience a little release,” said Davis. “She’s dealing with heavy topics, right? I think we have a tendency to feel overwhelmed by discomfort and whatever that brings up in us. We want to turn away or shut down. The thing that she has a real mastery of is knowing when to inject a little bit of her humor so we can stay present, so we can all laugh together to relieve the pressure a little.”

Juli said audiences who saw the work while it was in development at the Strand and elsewhere gave her important feedback. Her first show tested about 20 minutes of material, and she saw two people walk out. During the discussion, she asked audience members if they knew why.

“One woman said, ‘What you did was so triggering I almost left, too,'” Juli said. “I realized I was performing my trauma and I was sharing too much in performance, and it was such a gift to have had that early experience.”

She went back to work. Since then, she has asked her audiences: “Do you feel safe?” Consistently, the answer has been yes.

“It’s a fine line,” she said. “You don’t want to come in too hot, but you want to be able to engage your audiences in the topic. But that’s where we workshop.”

The Friday performance will also be followed by a panel discussion with advocates from New Hope Midcoast, a nonprofit working to end domestic abuse, dating violence and stalking, and Sexual Assault Support Services of Midcoast Maine (SASSMM).

Sarah Krajewski, the systems advocacy coordinator at SASSMM, said she is looking forward to seeing Juli’s performance for the first time and talking to the audience about how our brains process trauma.

“Bringing that conversation about sexual violence out into the open is always a good idea,” she said. “It brings it out of the darkness.”

Hillary Waterman, a community prevention educator in Knox and Waldo counties for New Hope Midcoast, said she hopes to emphasize that sexual abuse can happen in the context of domestic abuse, even though that is not Juli’s own experience.

Both groups said they have found art, such as collage making or poetry reading, to be a powerful tool in their support groups.

“It’s very freeing,” Waterman said.

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