Menagerie Dance Company was a duet dance company that toured programs for general audiences in theaters and youth in school assembly programs and lecture demonstrations. The company performed primarily in Virginia and but also in Maryland, New Jersey and New York from 1985-2000. Mark and Ella Magruder founded Menagerie Dance Company in 1984 and incorporated as a non-profit in 1985. During its 15-year full time touring schedule, Menagerie performed for over 100,000 people throughout the region.
Mark and Ella danced with the Mimi Garrard Dance Company in NYC, after they graduated from the University of Illinois and began performing their own duet concerts 1977. An early review of their work by Don McDonagh in the New York Times gave them their first official recognition and they began a career of duet and solo work that would last for several decades. They left NYC and completed an arts residency in Wisconsin schools 1978-80 under the sponsorship of the Wisconsin Arts Board and The Green Giant Corporation, while sharing a job teaching modern dance at Ripon College in Wisconsin.
From 1980-84, they taught at the University of Montana and performed duet concerts in Chicago, NYC and Washington D.C. where Pamela Sommers of The Washington Post noted in a positive review of their performance at The Dance Place that it was unusual to find married couples working together in the performing arts and compared them to actors Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach, actors who shared professional and private lives together.
In 1984 they moved to Virginia, Ella's native state. There they created Menagerie and joined other artists sponsored by Virginia Commission for the Arts. The VCA awarded them touring grants from 1985-2000 for outreach into schools across Virginia. Success came steadily in the form of bookings and media attention. In 1985 the Magruders also began a shared professorship at Sweet Briar College while building and touring their duet company, Menagerie.
Menagerie's goal was to create and perform shows that would increase enthusiasm and support for dance, while maintaining artistic excellence. True to the meaning of its name, Menagerie's dance topics varied widely, from the comic to the serious. Whether a subject of social justice, such as Where's Home? —a dance about the homeless in American cities, or the abstract content of Evos, a duet with a kinesthetic message of energy through risk taking shapes, lifts and balances —Menagerie deliberately made connections to its audiences through the types of dances that were accessible to a broad a range of people. For children they encouraged active audience participations during performances and lecture demonstrations. For Where's Home? Mark, a native of Chicago, received a choreographic award and funding from the VCA and National Endowment for the Arts. Menagerie accepted a major museum commission for choreography based on an Italian exhibition called Splendors of the Popes performed in Baltimore at the Walters Art Gallery. They performed this work, Rosemary, based on the Italian folktale recounted by the author, Italo Calvino. Another dance, Jack and the King's Girl grew from Ella's research through stories collected during the depression from rural America by the WPA writer's project. (This material is housed in the manuscripts room at the University of Virginia Library.)
Under state arts commission sponsorship, the company performed throughout Virginia, in every type of venue. From prefabricated trailer classrooms in the Appalachian coal country to overcrowded suburban schools in Northern Virginia, from the Tidewater region where fathers and mothers were deploying to foreign war zones to schools surrounded by tobacco fields in Southside Virginia; no stage was too small, no venue too challenging for the company, especially if it involved outreach to audiences unfamiliar with dance. One First Night (an alternative New Year's) performance even took place in a judicial courtroom around the permanently anchored defendants chair.
In 1991, Camille Hardy featured the company in Dance Magazine quoting Ella as saying "When we began touring, we had no idea that we would become missionaries for the art – of dance." During this time of intense concentration in the area of outreach to underserved communities, they also performed duet and solos in concerts in Finland, the Netherlands, Hungary and Italy, and the company's video work was screened in Virginia on public television and in Germany and France at film conferences.
By the mid 1990's Menagerie focused more and more on reaching young audiences. This coincided with changes in funding for the arts across the United States in the 1990's on the federal level. At this time the National Endowment for the Arts changed its focus away from using tax dollars to support large dance companies. State arts agencies that received federal money responded by directing grant money to broad public outreach, especially for performances in public schools. The idea of making dance more broadly accessible to young audiences made sense to Menagerie's founders because they were parents, and lived in an area that had little in the way of sophisticated performing arts venues. There was no Kennedy or Lincoln Center nearby. The obvious strategy if they wanted to reach more viewers for dance was to take dance out to young audiences in schools.
Menagerie adopted an old proverb as its motto for creating its school shows/lecture demonstrations and community performances for young people: "Tell me, I forget. Show me, I remember. Involve me, I understand. The idea related well to Menagerie's concept of creating broad dance access. The company's goal had always been aimed at promoting dance to the general public.
When the Magruders lived in New York in the late 1970's, often there were only a few people in the downtown dance scene audiences, this seemed unfair and uneconomical to them. They came to believe that because each loft or theater performance took such hard work these performances deserved to be seen by a greater number of people. Outside of Manhattan however, Menagerie later performed for audiences sometimes as large as a thousand people.
In its years of touring often ten or more shows a week to the far reaches of Virginia and the mid-Atlantic states, Menagerie also performed in large venues like the International Children's Festival at Wolftrap Farm Park and at the National Theater in Washington, D. C. The company stopped touring duets in 2000, and ended its non-profit corporation in 2006.
Ella Magruder wrote a book Dancing for Young Audiences: A Practical Guide to Creating, Managing, and Marketing a Performance Company based on what she and Mark had learned touring Menagerie because there were no books available to assist dancers in this type of career. The text has a section based on interviews with ten directors of dance companies from the United States and around the world who perform for young audiences. [Published by McFarland (North Carolina and London) in 2013, it is available in soft cover and000 as an eBook.] The Magruders continue to teach at Sweet Briar College in, Virginia, encouraging dance majors to perform and focus on building a dance program that prepares young choreographers, performers, and teachers.