Matheson, Katy

Katy Page Matheson (1948-2005) was an American editor, writer, performer, teacher, and dance historian. Matheson began her study of ballet and modern dance while attending Duke University where she performed with the Duke University Dance Group and at the Synergic Theatre. Between her junior and senior years, Matheson spent two years in Washington, D.C., where she danced in improvisations and works choreographed by others, including revivals of Doris Humphrey's Water Study and Shakers.

Matheson moved to New York City in 1975 and continued dancing, performing with dancers like Ellen Cornfield, Marjorie Gamso, Kenneth King, Jim Self, Harry Sheppard, and Elaine Shipman, among others. Her first original piece, a group work called Secretarial Suite, was performed in 1980. She held a series of open rehearsal performances called Five Mondays in January, 1983, and later that year participated in the group work Dancers and Characters. From 1992 to 1994, she performed a series of solo improvisations, as part of dance programs at The Field and the Knitting Factory. In addition to modern dance, Matheson studied historical and early dance, and was an active member of the New York Historical Dance Company.

Matheson's own career as a dancer was secondary to her interest in dance history and scholarship. In 1978, Matheson was an assistant coordinator, interviewer, and transcriber for the Oral History Project at the Dance Division in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. She was the initial editor and researcher for American Modern Dance: The Early Years (1981), was the principle researcher for the book Choreography by George Balanchine (1983), and in the early 1980s assisted Dale Harris with his unpublished book the Concise History of Ballet and Modern Dance.

In 1985, she began her graduate work in Performance Studies at New York University. Matheson graduated in 1991, and her thesis on Niblo's Garden, a 19th-century concert saloon, was later published in the Theatre Library Association monograph Pleasure Gardens (1998). At the same time, Matheson began contributing articles, reviews, and essays to dance publications and in 1989 was hired full-time at Dance Magazine, first as assistant to the editor and later as associate editor, a position she held until 1992.

Throughout the 1990s, Matheson continued writing and began to teach. She wrote the "Breaking Boundaries" section of Selma Jeanne Cohen's Dance as a Theatre Art (1992), in which she profiled Steve Paxton, Twyla Tharp, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Pina Baush, Garth Fagan, and Mark Morris; and wrote the chronology and did photo research for Costumes by Karinska (1996). Matheson also contributed articles on dance forms, dancers, and choreographers to various encyclopedias, including entries on Laura Dean and David Gordon for Fifty Contemporary Choreographers. In the mid-1990s, she taught courses on the history of dance at the College of New Rochelle and at Hofstra University. Matheson died in 2005 in New York City.

From the guide to the Katy Matheson papers, 1960-2003, (The New York Public Library. Jerome Robbins Dance Division.)