As a choreographer, Kathy has originated and advanced the disorganized body, a construct that re-organizes a mover's movement impulses. The disorganized body articulates disorder but also resilience, regeneration, and change. A sustained investigation from the starting point of an act of war on 9/11 – and living with chronic though not life-threatening illness – has resulted in a remade dancing body with implications beyond the choreography of a given work. It enables her to subvert physical practices that have informed her and speaks to the adaptability of the body and mind to ever shifting circumstance and environment.
Through the disorganized body she has explored pain, illness, and trauma, like with the Bessie-nominated Rambler, Worlds Worlds A Part (2019); the built environments of monuments (Anywhere, 2016); landfills and parks (PARK, 2008-present); war and body horror (Macho, 2008); human and animal culture (twisted, tack, broken, 2005); psycho-physical states of fear (Dark Matter, 2002); and interactive virtual environments (The Fortune Cookie Dance, 1999). These works have been seen at Chocolate Factory Theater, Gibney, New York Live Arts, Danspace Project, 92nd Street Y, Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, among others; and supported by commissions from Chocolate Factory, Gibney, Lumberyard, Dance Theater Workshop, and Danspace.
Her work has also been supported through local and national grants, awards, and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, Dance/NYC, Bronx Council on the Arts, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, Yaddo, Djerassi, NYC Parks Department, Governors Island Art Center, and the Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography.
