Last November, a month after Catey Ott Thompson danced a beautiful original solo in a concert celebrating the 20th anniversary of her invaluable Catey Ott Dance Collective, she suffered a crippling knee injury, a partial meniscus tear with adjacent torn cartilage that left, as she put it, “a pothole in my knee joint.”
Photo via Catey Ott Thompson - Instagram
Catey Ott Thompson (2026)
Catey Ott Thompson at Marquette University (2026)
Her whole life was devoted to choreographing and performing with her multigenerational dance company and teaching a variety of dance classes for Milwaukee Ballet and Marquette University. Suddenly, she couldn’t walk, much less dance.
Today she’s back to teaching. We met for coffee at Marquette, where I also teach, to discuss her company’s upcoming concert at Marquette’s Haggerty Museum of Art on September 26. Titled “Image and Identity: The Comings and Goings of Days,” it features the world premiere of her nine-minute film and a four-minute live solo expressing her body and soul through the course of this year.
I ask for details. “My first surgery last January was very interesting,” she begins. “They went in and fixed the meniscus, then took out any healthy cartilage that was left in my knee and grew it in a matrix in a laboratory for a month. For the second surgery in March, they implanted my brand-new cartilage, grown from my own tissue, back into the pothole in my knee.
“That surgery required bedrest for 6 weeks. For the first several weeks, I was lying for eight hours a day in a machine that just moved my leg up and down. Then I was on crutches through half of May. Once I was cleared, I worked in little increments, up to three hours a day, doing rehab physical therapy and mindful stretching, trying to build myself back into the dancer at the technical level that I was.”
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Living, Dancing
Photo courtesy of Catey Ott Thompson
Catey Ottt Thompson rehearsing (2026)
Catey Ott Thompson rehearsing post-recovery in studio for the collective's “Image and Identity: The Comings and Goings of Days,” at the Haggerty Museum (2026)
Later, I found a quote from her in an article I’d written about that 20th anniversary concert last October. It reads, “Everything I live, I dance. The body of work of the Catey Ott Dance Collective over the past 20 years is the living map of my life and, ideally, of where we fit in the community, the global society, the collective unconscious.” In other words, dance we can identify with.
Back to the present: “That first surgery was a very difficult time for me emotionally,” she continues. “I was used to dancing and teaching all day, six days a week, and everything I’d worked on seemed to be melting away: form, function, identity, emotion, everything in the professional dance realm.
“After the second surgery,” she continues, “I realized I had to make a turn for the better in terms of my internal landscape. A colleague told me that I needed to surrender to the situation, and that was my point of change. I realized it was true. There was nothing I could do to make the situation go faster. My wonderful friends and mentors got me through to the point where I could start to practice walking again. I realized that maybe I wouldn’t dance again. So, what other aspects of me are worth nurturing and celebrating? Whatever the outcome of the surgery would be, I had to make sure I was whole.
“I made an assignment for myself to save six seconds of film material every day taken on my cellphone, relatively close-up shots of some part of my body that was talking to me, shooting it ultra-close-up or distorted or out-of-size. I did a body scan every day to decide what was significant to express that day, something making me feel uncomfortable emotionally, physically, or both. And I was very vulnerable.
“Heidi Latsky has been a mentor and dear friend since 1995. She’s a dancer and has dealt with abilities and disabilities through her own life, and her own dance company’s life. She films her own works, and she offered to edit this film for me. I knew our collaboration would be exactly what the film needed, and truly what my heart needed, too.”
Training to Jump
The result is a nine-minute film, after which Ott Thomson will premiere a four-minute solo dance about her entire ordeal and where she’s come now. She’ll follow that with a 15-minute talk-back.
“It’s made me face a lot,” she says. “I’m in process right now of training to jump again. By maybe Halloween, I’ll able to demonstrate jumps in class again. Ideally by my 54th birthday on December 12, I’ll be able to leap. I’m trying to figure out the best way to celebrate coming back, and to bring out my gratitude for all the things that have happened.”
The concert will also feature works choreographed with or by the Catey Ott Dance Collective members Natasha Posey and Kayla Siedlecki, as well as solos by 2026 Marquette dance alumnae Erin Fricker, Maggie Lasher, and Estefany Ubac Villa.
This free, hour-long performance starts on Saturday, Sept. 26, 2:30 p.m. at the Haggerty Museum of Art on the Marquette campus, 1234 W. Tory Hill. Seating is limited. Arrive by 2:15 p.m. or come earlier and enjoy the Haggerty’s current free exhibition “The Otherworld Is Home.” For more information, visit cateyott.com/events.
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