“Sara ‘Toby’ Moore stands at the vanguard of clowning in America. Years spent in the spotlight with old-school industry behemoths like Ringling and Merv Griffin gave Toby a deep, practical knowledge of the artform's traditional expressions. As they matured as an artist. they found more freedom to marry this expertise with the creative dramaturgy of their theatrical writing. The combination has yielded a rich, prolific body of work that achieves nothing less than the reinvention of American clowning.

Their central innovation is to de-emphasize the external trappings of clowning and apply techniques drawn from across the performing arts and animation to express the clown's core identity: the Human Cartoon, a uniquely expressive physical storyteller. Human Cartoons embody the misfit, contradictory, and outrageous aspects of humanity through heightened physical expression informed by emotional nuance - what Toby describes as "precision idiocy" - to create empathetic, relatable characters that use their very "otherness" to connect with their audiences.

Toby has worked out this new evolution of clowning through their writing and their pedagogy, but most of all in dramatic practice, by applying its principles to characters in a wide variety of shows. They've explored and defined human cartooning in solo, ensemble, cabaret, and big top formats. Human cartoons have starred in superhero stories, teen adventures. fairy tales, confessional dramas, pantomimes, and more. Their last project. The Supers, combined superhero motifs with original music and themes of inclusion and alienation in the creation of something wholly new: a clown opera.

Toby has written eloquently, including in their essay State of the Clown, about the way that their genderqueer identity is part of their vision for what the clown is and means in society. They have expressed this better than I could: I will only pause to point out that circus and clowning, like so many traditional art forms, has been heavily dominated by cis-het males for most of its history, all the way to the present. It's one kind of accomplishment to break through in that world as a performer, which Toby did from an early age. It's another entirely to redefine an art form in a radically inclusive way around a deconstruction of traditional gender norms and identity. That is part of Toby's legacy, too.

Toby is truly an unusual genius who has enriched the cultural landscape and substantially advanced their chosen art form.”

• Barry Kendall, executive producer The Supers/Executive Director Circus Center, San Francisco, CA