Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Katharine Pettit. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Katharine, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
Currently the most urgent initiative I’m working on is OUTCRY with The Common Tribe, continuing our work with the Black Lives Matter movement:
“OutCry” spotlights social injustices perpetrated in America against the Global Majority, with a massive focus on Black Lives Matter and creating mental health care resources through spoken word, music, and movement on film.
“OutCry” acts as the catalyst to end the criminalization of mental illness, especially in Black and Brown communities, and ensure that people with mental health crises have access to adequate care in their most vulnerable moments and are not met with police retaliation and force.
ZCO/Dance Project, The Kingdom Dance Company and KPC – “Keeping People Connected” join forces to take “OutCry” to the next level in 2023, creating awareness and a call for action to end police brutality across America.
We are reaching out for support to film “OutCry” this FALL!
*Body Inclusive costuming for all of KPC’s members, particularly our Trans and Gender Non Conforming Artists
*Funding to compensate disabled and able bodied Performing Artists equitably for their time and talents
*Videographer expenses; editing and post production costs
*Marketing to reach the communities that “OutCry” serves and beyond!
*Any other suggestions on outreach and visibility that a partnership org might be able to offer!
More about The Common Tribe Collective:
ZCO/DANCEPROJECT is an internationally recognized physically integrated performing arts ensemble. Working in the disciplines of multimedia, spoken word and dance, ZCODP creates, performs, and teaches at the nexus of access, disability, dance, and race. We are led by dynamic, disabled artists who create, design, and perform outstanding work that speaks to and emerges from disability aesthetics and disability culture.
The Kingdom Dance Company provides quality instruction and training in the dance styles of Hip-Hop, Dancehall, African, Afrobeat and Step. We aim to highlight and enrich the lives of artists from different socio-economic backgrounds as well as disability statuses with free training in dance, dance instruction and project planning. Within our showcases we incorporate community service and free programming that gives back to the NYC community and youth. Our goal is to create healing through art and Art that heals.
KPC “Keeping People Connected” is a multidisciplinary collective of Performing Artists who tell stories examining social injustices and stigmatized, difficult subject matter through dance, music, and conversation. Believing in movement as our Pathway to Wellness, KPC creates groundbreaking dance musicals that center and celebrate disenfranchised people and marginalized communities, offering opportunities to process and cope with challenging lived experiences.
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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?
Sure! I’m Katharine Pettit, a Queer (they/she) intersectional artist creating mental healthcare and wellness resources through movement.
In 2016 I founded KPC and gathered Performing Artists who were also activists to be a part of the creative collective.
KPC – Keeping People Connected is a multidisciplinary collective of Performing Artists who tell stories examining social injustices and stigmatized subject matter through dance, music, and conversation.
Believing in Movement as our Pathway to Wellness, KPC creates groundbreaking dance musicals that center and celebrate disenfranchised people, offering opportunities to process and cope with challenging lived experiences.
Composed of Performing Artists from across the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, representing various races, nationalities, creeds, gender identities, abilities and disabilities, body shapes and sizes, KPC centers the disenfranchised in every story we tell. Each piece originates from lived experiences and creates space to center and celebrate marginalized communities.
KPC offers movement as a coping and processing device to people with substance use and mental health disorders and their loved ones.
KPC’s current initiatives include:
KPC’s Pathway to Wellness through Movement: I COULD NEVER LOVE ANYONE… is an adjunct resource for people dealing with substance use and mental health disorders.
“I could never love anyone as much as I love my sisters”, a quote from LITTLE WOMEN, inspired Katharine to draw from her lived experience with her sisters and turn a personal coping mechanism with family trauma into healing for everyone across the Recovery community and beyond.
I COULD NEVER LOVE ANYONE… is a dance musical that centers a person with substance use disorder and her siblings as they face this family disorder together.
KPC’s Pathway to Wellness through Movement: I COULD NEVER LOVE ANYONE… is a resource for people dealing with substance use and mental health disorders. Starting with a movement workshop, followed by the performance of I COULD NEVER LOVE ANYONE…, culminating in a talkback, KPC offers dance as healing therapy in treatment centers.
a Queer Love story, UNTITLED GIRL NARRATIVE spotlights three young people coming of age, embracing their power as LGBTQ+ youth in today’s America.
UNTITLED GIRL NARRATIVE is increasingly urgent for inclusion of LGBTQ+ persons in the performing arts industry. KPC recognizes the need for LGBTQ+ youth to see themselves and their stories as valuable with the war on Trans and Gender Non Conforming peoples rights across America.
“Transcend, Uplifting Their Voices” concert and scholarship initiative emerged in July 2021 to offer artists and audiences the chance to work towards equity and inclusion by dismantling systemic racism through the decolonization of the performing arts industry. KPC creates resources for Black TGNC young people who are pursuing careers in dance.
“OutCry” spotlights social injustices perpetrated in America against the Global Majority, with a massive focus on Black Lives Matter and creating mental health care resources through spoken word, music, and movement on film.
“OutCry” acts as the catalyst to end the criminalization of mental illness, especially of Black and Brown people, and ensure that people with mental health crises have access to adequate care in their most vulnerable moments and are not met with police retaliation and force.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
I believe as a human and creative that my generative work comes from the idea of movement as a pathway to wellness. Healing through dance and music leads to difficult, stigmatized conversations that ultimately lead to understanding each other; “we are more alike than we are different” as my motivating credo.
When I first choreographed KPC’s dance musical, I COULD NEVER LOVE ANYONE…, it began as a way to express my familial trauma with substance use disorder and addiction. As I continue the journey of telling my story through dance, I’m realizing the artists and audiences drawn to each presentation also have lived experience with addiction. They share with me how they feel seen, validated and not alone by participating in the three part experience; movement workshop, performance, and talkback.
Through research and distance to gain perspective, I COULD NEVER LOVE ANYONE… evolved into KPC’s Pathway to Wellness through Movement.
Addiction by its very nature is an isolating and incredibly lonely disorder, aggravated to the Nth degree throughout the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic.
Community is key to a lasting recovery and KPC’s Pathway to Wellness through Movement elevates individuals ability to connect with themselves and each other in a visceral manner that talk therapy alone may not achieve.
KPC – “Keeping People Connected” is normalizing support for mental health, offering radical fellowship that strengthens understanding and connection through the Performing Arts as a pathway to social justice and equity.
KPC curates accessible, inclusive work and creates opportunities for people to recognize that we are more alike than we are different, offering unity rather than division through dance, music and conversation.
I envision an empathetic New York and New Yorkers with the tools that perhaps they didn’t have before to take a minute, breathe, connect with their internal emotions by externalizing their feelings through dance, experiencing the transformative power of live performing arts, and engaging in stimulating dialogue that will lead to even more discoveries of how to “Keep People Connected” and plugged in to their fellow person’s needs to be healthy, safe, and happy in a more holistic way: physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Encouraging our audiences and artists to center mental health and wellness and allow themselves to be vulnerable to self discovery and connection with other people is the primary mission of KPC’s Pathway to Wellness through Movement.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
I’ve been grounded in and working on the front lines of the Black Lives Matter movement for many years now. Originally from St. Louis, MO, my blinders of white privilege and fragility were ripped away when Michael Brown was killed in the streets of Ferguson, MO, not dissimilarly to how some people experienced George Floyd’s murder.
A close connection in the dance and LGBTQ+ community was killed in July, 2023, simply for voguing and expressing joy in a Black body. O’Shae Sibley was a part of KPC’s “Transcend, Uplifting Their Voices” concert and scholarship initiative in 2021, so this murder was truly a gut punch of loss and heartbreak.
The thing I’ve noticed is that more people seem affected by O’Shae’s death than previous Black people’s deaths in the last three years specifically. Perhaps it was because he was killed on his way home from the Beyonce concert? Because Beyonce posted on her website about O’Shae, more people felt they needed to performatively mourn openly?
The truth is, more White people need to live daily in the WAR and ongoing fight for justice and need to join the OUTCRY, saying “Stop Killing Us” alongside our Black and Brown siblings.
The not at all surprising thing is that in a week… or a month… those that joined the calls for justice will fade into the woodwork once more and yet the work will continue for our lifetimes.
I’d be surprised if the outrage and calls for action continue beyond this week and into the next. Ask me again in the next stage of interviews, hopefully there is some more optimism then, fueled by the consistency of people showing up to fight alongside us.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.katharinepettitcreative.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/keepingpeopleconnected/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/katharinepettitcreative
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/KPettitCreative
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@keepingpeopleconnected
- Other: https://linktr.ee/KatharinePettitCreative
Image Credits
Michael Bonasio Media