Melissa's just too good

Melissa Toogood confirmed her status as one of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s most gifted and riveting performers during the company's two-year Legacy Tour -- at the end of which, it ceased to exist. This closure had a profound impact on the American dance scene – and it also put its 14 dancers in uncharted territory. Having made it into one of the most important and influential American modern dance companies, performing the singularly demanding work of a seminal 20th-century choreographer, they now faced the troubling question of “what next”?

For Toogood, an Australian dancer who joined the company in 2007, the end of the line came as she was reaching her prime dancing years. “For some of the dancers, it was the perfect ending. For me, I was only just getting started,” she said during a June phone interview. “I not only had to mourn losing Merce, but the career I thought I was going to have with that company. But we had over two years to get used to the idea. [The Legacy Tour, and the subsequent ending of the company, was planned and announced shortly after Cunningham’s death in July 2009.] I really made the most of that time I had doing Cunningham work. I just tried to prepare myself for it ending -- at the same time giving everything to that process, without getting ahead of myself.

 The good news is that Toogood has been anything but idle. Multiple projects with a variety of choreographers have kept her busy on a number of New York City stages and elsewhere. Choreographers clearly are eager to work with this exceptionally lucid, intelligent dancer, who blends elegance and control with spontaneity and an air of meditative mystery.

 During three successive months, New York audiences saw her perform with authority and radiance in the works of three contrasting choreographers. In March, she was in Rashaun Mitchell’s Interface at the Baryshnikov Arts Center – joining three other former Cunningham dancers (including Mitchell) in a work that explored the physicality and transmission of emotions and featured striking, site-specific visual designs.

In April, she veered far from the pristine Cunningham esthetic, appearing at the same venue in Dining Alone, by Miami-based choreographer Rosie Herrera. In this dance-theater work, Toogood performed what critic Deborah Jowitt describes as “a precarious supported adagio on a plate” and literally let down her hair, smoothing it out luxuriantly onto a companion’s dinner plate.

 Toogood’s exceptional control, strength and hypnotic presence were on full display in May when she performed in Pam Tanowitz’s The Spectators, at New York Live Arts. Tanowitz is a notably intelligent and unique “downtown” choreographer, who draws on the techniques of classical ballet as well as Cunningham but blends in her own distinctive investigations and processes.

 One wonders how it has been to switch gears so completely -- from focusing intensively on the work of a single choreographer during her MCDC years, to working with a multiplicity of choreographers with considerably varied aesthetics. “I had always been interested in doing a lot of different things,” Toogood said. “I never tried to be a great Cunningham dancer; I just wanted to be a great dancer. I went to Merce because I loved the work, and I felt that for one choreographer. There was so much range in the work.

 “Now that I’m not dancing for him anymore, I feel very fortunate that I don’t have to choose between doing one type of thing [and another]. I’m actually very lucky; a lot of choreographers have given me the opportunity to do a variety of things. That’s something that’s very Australian, actually.  In Australia, there aren’t many people that just train in one type of style. Everyone grows up doing ballet, jazz, tap, singing and dancing – all of it.

 “All through college, in the US, I never really knew which direction I wanted to head in – because I loved everything that I did – until I took a Cunningham class. Then I felt, OK, I feel like I finally have some direction.” Toogood graduated from New World School of the Arts, in Miami, and it was as a student there that she made the Cunningham connection. “At the same time, after knowing that I wanted to do that, I still applied for a lot of different festivals, went to Jacob’s Pillow. I went to the Martha Graham School. I did all these, because I did like doing a variety of things.”

 She first met, and worked with Rosie Herrera, during those college years. “We just clicked immediately, and became  very good friends. So she knew me before Merce. She’s always known that I have an interest in a lot of different ways of moving – and has seen me do many other types of things. Some of her friends are break dancers, and I would play in the studio with them. So when the [Cunningham] company ended, she was one of the first people to call and ask if I had certain dates available. So we re-connected.

 “Her work is different from Merce in that for her, it doesn’t start with the movement. It starts with a story or a dramatic impulse. She has very strong ideas behind every step that she makes. So I had to come at it from a different direction. Her work deals with sensuality and sexuality.  It’s a little outrageous for some people but that really is what Miami is like. It was really fun to access that part of myself. But at the same time, there’s a lot of depth to it, and that’s why I really love working with her.”

 Tanowitz is another choreographer with whom Toogood had done some previous work, and reunited for Spectators. She’ll be in Tanowitz’s next premiere, and is also serving as rehearsal director. “I love to be pushed to my limits physically; I feel like I’m in my prime right now, so I feel that I want to be pushing myself while I can. In Pam’s work, I’m able to do that. There’s also a freedom she gives us in interpreting work. She’s very open to us having ideas. She’ll come into the space with an idea, or teaching a phrase. If something else happens, she’ll go with it – which is a wonderful thing to have happen in a studio.

 “Coming back to her work, after having a break from it – I think we’ve both grown in a lot of different ways. She’s more open to me being more dramatic now – which is wonderful, because I’ve never held myself back from performing something in a way the movement is telling me it wants to come out of me.”

 Somehow, amidst these ventures, Toogood also found time in April to teach a Cunningham workshop in Angers, France. She was named a Cunningham Fellow this year, through an ongoing program of the Merce Cunningham Trust that offers former Cunningham dancers the opportunity to restage seminal Cunningham during a multi-week intensive workshop. Toogood was the first of the Fellows whose project took place outside of New York City. She taught the French dancers – members of one of the nation’s centers chorégraphiques where longtime Cunningham dancer and assistant Robert Swinston is now the director – portions of Rebus, a 1975 work. “The response of the dancers who did the workshop was really wonderful. I had such a variety of dancers, who were intrigued by the information they could gain from it. So I’ve been building lasting relationships there.”

Teaching plays a significant ongoing role in Toogood’s schedule. She teaches Cunningham technique classes in New York, was a guest faculty member at Bard College last year, and will teach at Princeton University this fall (September). Being in such demand has its challenges, she acknowledges. “I’m learning that I have to schedule days off for myself, too.”

 Toogood has been nominated for a Bessie Award in performance for her dancing in Mitchell’s and Tanowitz’s pieces. She has quite a list of projects in various stages of planning and development with choreographers David Parker, Kyle Abraham, Kimberly Bartosik, Sally Silvers, and Stephen Petronio. Christopher Caines plans to make a duet for her and her sister Jodie (who recently participated in a Cunningham Fellowship workshop). Clearly, choreographers are lining up to work with this compelling, eloquent dancer.

-- SUSAN REITER