Katherine Litz

Katherine Litz (July 26, 1912, Denver, Colorado – December 19, 1978, New York City) was an American dancer, choreographer, and teacher whose career spanned Broadway performance, modern dance, and academic instruction. She trained under Martha Graham and Hanya Holm, and became recognized for solo work characterized by humor and irony.

Litz's Broadway career ran from 1933 to 1948 and included appearances in Willie the Weeper, The Dancer, the revue As Thousands Cheer, and Oklahoma! Between 1936 and 1942, she also danced with the Doris Humphrey–Charles Weidman modern dance company, performed with a concert group organized by Agnes de Mille, and appeared in Carousel.

In the late 1940s, artist and dancer Elizabeth Jennerjahn recruited Litz to join the faculty at Black Mountain College. During her time there, she taught Viola Farber, who later became a founding member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. From 1950 to 1951, Litz collaborated with composer Lou Harrison and a group of students and teachers to create The Glyph, a multimedia work incorporating a painted backdrop by Ben Shahn, music by Harrison with piano accompaniment by David Tudor, and poetry by Charles Olson. Litz described the piece's unifying concept as "a compound image contained in a single work." She performed The Glyph at the 1977 New York Dance Festival, where it was filmed. In 2015 and 2016, dancer Polly Motley and director Richard Colton recreated the work in conjunction with the exhibition Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933–1957, presented at the ICA Boston and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

Though not affiliated with a permanent company or a specific school of dance, Litz developed and regularly performed a body of solo works. These included Daughter of Virtue (1949), Fire in the Snow (1949), Blood of the Lamb (1950), The Long Night (1950), And No Birds Sang (1952), Super Duper Jet Girl (1953), Vaudeville: Madame Belinda Bender's Dancing School (1953), The Story of Love from Fear to Flight (1953), and Homage to Lillian Gish (1978). She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1965. Litz was married to artist and set designer Charles Oscar. Her papers are held at the New York Public Library.