Many people come to a decision on what they want to with their life and follow it to completion. For Katy Tye, Upper School drama teacher, that decision is ongoing and fluid.
Growing up here in Dallas, Tye’s interest in performative arts began at a very young age.
“My parents dropped me off at Dallas Children’s Theater when I was 3 years old, and then I did my first play when I was five, and I just stuck with it,” Tye said. “Nothing else drew my attention.”
Following her foray into theater in her youth, Tye’s early interest in performative arts embodied her athletic pursuits from a young age, competing in sports such as gymnastics and diving.
“Gymnastics was a good sport for me at the time,” Tye said. “It was a lot of fun. But then I think when my body got tired of it, so I went to diving because the water was slightly more gentle than mats and the floor.”
While growing up in the Highland Park school system, she developed an interest in physics that was ultimately deterred by a challenging AP Physics course.
“I love physics; it’s super cool, but AP physics made me cry. In theater, I only cry when I have to,” Tye said.
Tye ultimately made the decision to attend Southern Methodist University, where she earned her Bachelors of Fine Arts and was introduced to fight choreography and cirque, sparking a passion for movement as a form of communicative expression.
“One of my professors that did fight choreography also did trapeze, and so sometimes he would hang the trapeze in our room or an aerial silk, and that’s where I started,” Tye said. “I went to that class for a while, and I almost went to circus school to do Cirque du Soleil. My first theater company that I started when I was in college was a movement theater company, and so we didn’t use words in our plays. We used clowning, dance circus and all that kind of stuff. Physical movement has always been really important to me.”
Tye’s interest in fight choreography and motion capture lead her to participate in the production of the video game, Borderlands 3, and she became the assistant stunt coordinator for the film The Finale.
“You kind of just fall into something and then doors start opening,” Tye said. “I had a friend whom I did circus with that did a little bit of motion capture for Borderlands, and he told them that I was good at movement, so that’s how I got into doing motion capture for Borderlands.”
