We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sarah Fye. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sarah below.

Sarah, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

Basically, I came out of the womb singing and dancing. Even at three years old, I used to twirl around in the kitchen in a pair of pink patent leather shoes and say, “I want to be a ballerina, mommy!” I don’t know that I actually wanted to be a ballerina, per se, but I knew I wanted to be on stage performing for people.

My mom was doing her friend a favor by picking up her daughter from dance class one fateful evening. I jumped in line with the little dancers and began moving with them in perfect time. It was a five year old class, and the teacher said she never allowed anyone under five, but that I clearly had talent and a drive, so she let me join the class, even though I was technically “under age”.

Dancing was my first true love, and I have never stopped dancing. I consider it to be my gateway drug to all of the other performance arts I participate in today. I danced all through school, and my plan was to move to New York City as soon as I finished high school to pursue a career as a dancer. My parents asked me my junior year what my plans were for college. I just looked at them blankly and said, “College? I’m not going to college. I’m moving to New York to dance.”

Needless to say, that conversation didn’t go my way, and my parents told me it was either go to college or move out at 18 with no support from them. And since I hadn’t been paying much attention in school, and had not really studied hard enough to get into NYU, I was left with one option–to attend MTSU, the giant state school right in the backyard of my hometown of Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

I was talking with a friends mom and she asked me what I was going to study in college. I told her I was just going to take general education courses until I “figured it out”. Knowing I hadn’t exactly been a straight A student, she asked me what I was interested in pursuing. I told her, “I’ve never really cared about anything but dancing”.

“Why don’t you study theatre, then? You might like it, and if you don’t, you can always choose a different path and change your major”.

I thought that was a pretty good idea, so I signed up for theatre classes. The first assignment for all freshman performance majors was to audition for the fall musical. I had not done very much theatre and didn’t consider myself to be a singer or an actor, but I gave it a shot. Lo and behold, after my first audition, I was cast as the leading dancer in “The Music Man”.

From there on, I was bitten by the bug and there was no turning back.

I became obsessed with theatre, dance, musicals, acting, comedy, all of it. I took overtime classes every semester, auditioned for everything, performed as much as I was allowed, ate, drank, and slept performance. I became an ACTF/ACDRA award nominated actor and dancer/choreographer. And when I graduated from college, I finally got my dream of moving to New York to pursue my career as a professional performer.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I moved to New York City when I was 22 with 2 suitcases of clothes and $2200 in my pocket. I knew very little about life, love, struggle, perseverance, money, or even what it meant to lead a happy and successful life. But what I did know was that I wanted to pursue a career as a performer.

My best friend Brandon and I shared a huge 2 bedroom apartment in a fifth floor walk up building in Washington Heights. I started taking dance classes at Steps On Broadway, Broadway Dance Center, and Peridance, and began auditioning for roles as a dancer in musicals, plays, and for dance companies. During and after class, teachers would often come up to me and say things like, “It was a pleasure to watch you dance”. This doesn’t happen often in a New York City class, where there are SO many students. I felt so humbled to be approached by them, especially because the other dancers would often come up to me after class and say things like, “He must’ve really thought something of you, because he never compliments anyone”.

So my skills weren’t a “problem”, it was my head. I grew up in what would be considered a large body for a dancer. And as hard as I worked and as much joy as I found dancing in a class, I just had a really hard time accessing that joyful part of myself in the audition room. I would often look around at everyone else and immediately, the thoughts of, “You are HUGE compared to everyone else here. What were you thinking??? They won’t even look at you. Why do you even try? You’re too big. No one wants to see you dance, not with that body”.

And then, of course, I would be totally in my head, unable to focus, and a total mess. If I was able to get over myself, I would often be called back or even cast in a show. But more often than not, I was in my head about my body, and at a total loss.

I was in a bit of a slump when I randomly came across a flyer for a four week sitcom boot camp, hosted by Richard Kline from Three’s Company. I had always been a bit of a clown, so I decided to sign up.

The first week of class, Richard gave us the comedy low down and assigned scenes for us to work with our scene partners. A casting director would attend the final week to watch our tapes and give us notes. Richard told us, “The straight man is the hardest part to play in comedy”. And of course, I was assigned a scene as the straight man.

Four weeks later, the class reviewed our taped scenes and the casting director gave us notes. After my tape was shown, Richard told the class that I was the “perfect straight man”. As our class was being dismissed, he pulled me aside and told me I was really funny and invited me to attend his weekly class.

From there, I started studying acting with the great comedic genius Richard Kline. He really believed in me, helped me get in audition rooms, and I got to meet a lot of industry folks through his classes and connections.

An established comedian in Richard’s class convinced me to take an eight week stand up workshop with him, and at the end of the eight weeks, I was able to perform in a showcase for the clubs booker. I really struggled during those seven weeks of class, but on the eighth week, I somehow pulled through and actually had a great set at the club. I ended up getting a couple of spots on shows at that club, and when I moved back to Nashville a few months later, I continued to pursue work as a stand up comedian.

Stand up was a roller coaster for me. I found myself booking lots of shows, traveling to perform, and even being awarded the title of the 2018 Stand Up Comic of the Year. But what I didn’t find was a deep love for stand up comedy. I liked it, I was good at it, but it wasn’t something that excited me. I felt an overwhelming pressure to be GREAT at it when really I just wanted to use stand up as a means to get to what I really wanted, which was to be an actor. I decided in 2022 to table stand up comedy and focus more on my acting and dance.

Currently, I am a founding member of the award winning premier comedy dance troupe CGDC: Chattahoochie Girls Don’t Cry. I am working on producing my first play in the spring of 2024, and am consistently auditioning and working as an actor. I also perform as a pole dance artist in pole shows across the country under my alias, Sapphire.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

The most rewarding aspect of being an artist is to uncover the deepest parts of myself that I would not know how to access if my creative life did not exist.

Being an artist to me is akin to spirituality or astrology or even like tasting new varietals of wine. You cannot and will not ever get to the bottom of it. There is always something deeper to uncover and a new place to go.

As an actor, I really think there is not a character I could not play, but I don’t mean that from a place of ego. I know there are roles that I don’t look the part of or whatever, but I guess what I’m saying is that there is not a character who has not experienced something as a human that I have also experienced. And in that way, I connect to the characters I play. What do we have in common? Everyone at their core has a need for love. I think that’s a great starting place in developing a character because we all, as human beings, need love. So that’s where I start. And from there, I look for other places of connection with this person. What is their goal or their mission in the scene, in the play, in their life? Have I ever had a similiar goal or mission? When? Where was I? What was it? How did I feel? So instead of starting at some unknown place and trying to just come up with a characters strife out of the blue, I look at what they have and what I have in common. And I find there is always something there. And this reminds me that everyone on the planet, everyone no matter what, has a shared human experience. At our core, we all need love. So I try and take that out of my acting and into the world.

As far as my work as a dancer goes, I believe movement is holy. As my body changes, as I grow or shift or expand or tighten, my dance changes, too. But my relationship to movement does not change. It’s healing. If I’m having a rough day, I dance. And I always always always feel better. It’s the thing that is both difficult and easy. The body has so many lessons to teach us, and I never want to stop learning.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

The greatest lesson I learned and unlearned only to learn again is to never do anything because other people say you should. Life is too short to should all over yourself.

I knew I didn’t want to continue to do stand up for a long time, but so many people were invested in my career and wanted me to succeed at it.

I can tell people I’m an actor, that I’ve been in commercials and feature films and have won awards as an actor, and they don’t care. The minute I tell people I do stand up, they are just so intrigued by it. “Oh wow! That’s so cool, you’re so brave. Can we watch you on YouTube?”

I don’t know why this is, but maybe it’s because being an actor is more elusive and being a stand up seems more accessible to people. Who knows?

Anyway, all of this, “oh my gosh, you’re so funny! You can’t QUIT doing stand up! You’re too good! I think you should keep going!” made me keep going when I did not want to keep going. And while I don’t believe in time wasted, I do think I could have expelled my energy in a more useful way had I not been out doing shows til 1 am 4 nights a week for 7 years of my life.

So whatever it is you’re pursuing creatively, I think the lesson I learned is to do it because you love it. Everything in the world follows the energy of love. There is no other good reason.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.sarahfye.com
• Instagram: @safyeri or @sapphiredancediva or @CGDCofficial or @crooksandgum
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sarahannfye

Image Credits
Photos by Jen Stalvey, Melissa Passons, and Samantha Gordon.