Photography by Michael Bonasio
A Lindbergh High School grad (2000) who’s now a choreographer in New York, Katharine Pettit grew up so close to her younger sister, they were often mistaken for twins. They never minded. “We knew if people could see our hearts, they’d know how alike we actually were,” she says. They lived together in New York after her sister graduated from college. “But slowly, over time, addictions within her revealed themselves,” Pettit says. “First an eating disorder, then alcoholism and drug addiction.”
The next decade was one rehab stint after another. “It took all that time to realize that if she didn’t want to save her life, none of us could save it for her,” Pettit says. “I felt helpless, desperate after all those years of fighting, guilty because I couldn’t answer the question of what could make my sister happy and healthy.”
At the end of 2013, Pettit and her youngest sister—worried that they’d been “enabling”—took drastic action, cutting off all communication with their middle sister.
Around the same time, Pettit started exploring movement set to “There will Be Tears” by Mr. Hudson, a British R&B singer. “That song evoked all the angst, grief and hopelessness I felt at not having my sister as part of my life,” she says.
But the dance she ultimately choreographed went well beyond that private pain, telling a story that speaks to any audience.
Photography by Michael Bonasio
Katharine Pettit
“I Could Never Love Anyone,” named after the line in Little Women in which Jo insists she could never love anyone as much as her sisters, was performed in October 2014 as part of The Emerging Artist Theater new work series, and now Pettit’s scrambling to crowdfund a full-length version that will debut in February at the Green Space Take Root Initiative in Astoria, N.Y.
Meanwhile, she and her sister have reconnected—this past July, on Pettit’s birthday. And when they talked, a little tentatively, about the dance project, the sister said she felt humbled that her struggle inspired it.
Art’s so often born of pain—and so often helps the healing.
