Choreographer and dancer

Guest faculty, Dance, Sarah Lawrence

When Kathy Westwater starting feeling disconnected from the dancing life, she knew it was time to try some new moves.

Foundations/Motivations: Danced, wanted to explore choreography further
Experiences:  Gained confidence, choreographed a dance quartet
Results: Writes about dance, creates and performs dances, and teaches

Foundations/Motivations

Kathy’s list of accomplishments was long even before she arrived at Sarah Lawrence. She danced her way throughout New York City and toured nationally and internationally. She was a guest artist at schools from New York to Puerto Rico. She was making dances, and it was while she was creating both live and virtual versions of “The Fortune Cookie Dance” that she decided to go deeper with choreography. “I considered a number of schools, but Sarah Lawrence was my first choice, mainly because of its history—so many people I consider great dance artists went there,” she says.

Undergraduate:

B.A., Economics, College of William and Mary (1985)

Before Sarah Lawrence:

From 1991 to 1999, Kathy performed in the works of choreographer Merián Soto and visual artist Pepón Osorio. She was a 1997 Movement Research artist-in-residence in New York City. Her work was presented in a variety of spaces in the city, including Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Performance Space 122, and Movement Research at Judson Church.

Experiences

Kathy had choreographed before, but at Sarah Lawrence she saw how much further she could go with it. “I didn’t understand the depth of my craft and its potential until I had these great teachers reveal to me what was possible,” she says. She points out that Sarah Lawrence graduates perform in faculty work and that sometimes faculty perform in their former students’ work—something unheard of in the dance world’s typical hierarchy. “It made a big difference to have people so accomplished in their field so involved in my own development as an artist,” Kathy says. “It gave me a lot of confidence.”

Thesis:

“Dark Matter”
The idea that “dark matter” makes up much of the universe became the organizing principle for Kathy’s thesis, a quartet. “Every time we learned something in composition, I would try it on this material. It was a great learning experience,” she says. “And luckily it turned out to be an interesting piece.” After she finished her M.F.A., she presented “Dark Matter,” in two parts, at Dance Theater Workshop. “Dark Matter” continues to evolve: there’s now a Part 3.

Results

Today, Kathy lives out many aspects of her Sarah Lawrence education—choreographing, dancing, writing, and teaching. She writes about dance, most recently with an article in the Movement Research Journal. She spends three days a week in the studio and loves every minute of it, experimenting as much as possible. Her latest work, “Interspecies Love,” a “neo-romantic melodrama,” will premiere in spring 2005 at Joyce Soho in Manhattan. And as an guest faculty member teaching improvisation and composition at Sarah Lawrence, she says, “All of that feeds back into my teaching. I’m able to share in my classroom what I’m doing in my own work.”

Further education:

M.F.A., Dance, Sarah Lawrence (2001)

Advocacy:

The summer after she finished her master’s, Kathy was the principal writer and editor of the Dancer’s Forum Compact—a set of guidelines for the working relationship between choreographers and dancers. Developed by the Dancer’s Forum, which she had helped found years earlier, the compact has now been copyrighted, presented at a national pedagogy conference of colleges, published on the Dance Theatre Workshop Web site, and covered by the Village Voice. “It’s an unprecedented step in terms of the labor relationship in my field, and I’m really proud of it,” Kathy says.