Latest news with #Toogood
Sydney Morning Herald
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Meet the Aussie dancer chosen to run one of the world's most prestigious dance schools
At 13, Melissa Toogood took a deep breath and made a call that changed her life. The teenage dancer from Campbelltown had just watched students from Newtown's School of Performing Arts at the annual Schools Spectacular. She was blown away. 'I called the school and I asked to audition,' she says. 'I was scared. But, hey, it paid off.' She was accepted and began taking her first steps towards an international contemporary dance career. 'You can't wait for an opportunity to come your way. I'm a shy person, but when it's mattered, I'm willing to put myself out there,' she says. Three decades on, Toogood's stellar career has just taken a giant leap. She has been appointed dean and director of the Juilliard School's dance division in New York, one of the world's leading performing arts institutions. She will be responsible for nurturing a new generation of contemporary dancers and will have up to 90 young dance students under her wing. It will mean largely moving away from performing, but at 43, she is ready to step out of that limelight. 'I still want to live an artful life,' she says. 'But I don't want to be the one making it all the time any more. I'll be able to put together all these skills that I've already been working on into one job, at a time when I feel more inspired to help other artists with their careers than my own.' Toogood has spent most of her career in New York. She went to the United States at 18 to pursue her dance studies, and since then she's worked with many leading dance companies and choreographers.
The Age
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Meet the Aussie dancer chosen to run one of the world's most prestigious dance schools
At 13, Melissa Toogood took a deep breath and made a call that changed her life. The teenage dancer from Campbelltown had just watched students from Newtown's School of Performing Arts at the annual Schools Spectacular. She was blown away. 'I called the school and I asked to audition,' she says. 'I was scared. But, hey, it paid off.' She was accepted and began taking her first steps towards an international contemporary dance career. 'You can't wait for an opportunity to come your way. I'm a shy person, but when it's mattered, I'm willing to put myself out there,' she says. Three decades on, Toogood's stellar career has just taken a giant leap. She has been appointed dean and director of the Juilliard School's dance division in New York, one of the world's leading performing arts institutions. She will be responsible for nurturing a new generation of contemporary dancers and will have up to 90 young dance students under her wing. It will mean largely moving away from performing, but at 43, she is ready to step out of that limelight. 'I still want to live an artful life,' she says. 'But I don't want to be the one making it all the time any more. I'll be able to put together all these skills that I've already been working on into one job, at a time when I feel more inspired to help other artists with their careers than my own.' Toogood has spent most of her career in New York. She went to the United States at 18 to pursue her dance studies, and since then she's worked with many leading dance companies and choreographers.
New York Times
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Melissa Toogood Named New Director of Juilliard's Dance Division
The Juilliard School has named Melissa Toogood as dean and director of its dance division, the school announced on Tuesday. Toogood, a Bessie Award-winning dancer who was a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in its final years, succeeds Alicia Graf Mack, who is to become the artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Toogood, who is Australian and lives in Sydney, will begin on July 1. 'I've had many types of experiences and worked with many kinds of dancers and companies, Toogood, 43, said in a phone interview. 'I've always been reaching for new knowledge.' Damian Woetzel, president of the Juilliard School, called her 'one of the extraordinary artists of our time' and said: 'I've watched her stage, I've watched her teach, I've watched her develop dancers at all levels, but really focusing on the younger dancers. And I have seen her develop her own leadership in that way that is inspiring.' Toogood, who started teaching at the Cunningham school at the choreographer's request, continued to dance in New York after Cunningham's company performed for the last time in 2011. 'I had a really intense freelance career, which is challenging and uncertain, and I hope to prepare young people for all of those outcomes,' she said. 'Because I can speak to it personally.'
New York Times
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A House That Reimagines English Country Style
IN 2017, WHEN the British designer Faye Toogood, already the mother of one, learned that she was pregnant with twins, she found herself craving more space and privacy than life in central London allowed. And so, along with her husband, the broadcaster and writer Matt Gibberd, and their eldest daughter, Indigo, now 12, she moved to the small city of Winchester, in Hampshire, where she'd spent her teens. The family, which soon included the twins Etta and Wren, now 7, lived first in a rental cottage, then in a Victorian garden flat down the road from Toogood's parents. Finally, in 2020 they settled into a two-story Victorian outside of town, eight miles east of Winchester's Norman Gothic cathedral. A country manor whose stucco facade is interrupted by an elegant arched loggia, the house is a departure from the spare, conceptual spaces that the couple always inhabited in London. And, they insist, it was never their intention to live on such a grand scale: The six-bedroom house encompasses 6,500 square feet and sits on five and a half acres. But Toogood, 48 — who, since establishing her namesake studio in 2008, has become well known for her sculptural furniture, modern decorative objects, workwear-inspired clothing and minimalist residential interiors — often leans heavily on intuition as a designer and took a similar approach to house hunting. 'This is the house,' she says, 'that invited us in.' Built in the late 19th century, the slate-roofed mansion sits high above the main road, its crescent-shaped, south-facing lawn giving way to a patchwork of fields and grassland that slope down to the River Itchen on the horizon. It was the picturesque setting that drew Gibberd, 47 — who is the grandson of the English architect and town planner Frederick Gibberd — to the property. 'The view,' he points out, 'is the only thing you can't change.' In remaking the home to suit her family, Toogood also worked from the outside in, first repainting the pistachio exterior a light taupe and then adorning the frontage with pale pink climbing roses. Inside, the goal was to soften the space, which had been stripped of its original finishes by the previous owners and, says Toogood, 'lit up like a football stadium' with recessed fixtures, which they removed. After restoring the moldings and fireplaces — which had been covered up, layered in paint or fitted with modern wood burners — they installed traditional Victorian cast-iron radiators in many rooms, refurbished the sash windows and renovated the kitchen, adding internal glass windows and doors, an Aga stove, Plain English cabinetry and Derbyshire fossil stone countertops. WHEN FRIENDS FROM London visit for the first time, the couple say, they're often taken aback, having expected to find the pared-down interiors that Toogood is best known for designing and that Gibberd has championed with the Modern House, the London-based real estate agency-cum-digital magazine that he co-founded in 2011. Instead they're met with Pierre Frey floral curtains in the dining room, Jean Monro rose fabric on the primary bedroom headboard and botanical chintz armchairs in the sitting room. But Toogood points out that the décor is less a departure than a return: She and Gibberd first met working at The World of Interiors, where they developed an appreciation for print and pattern under the tutelage of the magazine's founding editor, Minn Hogg, an affirmed maximalist. One enters the home through a rectangular foyer, where the walls are papered with a woodland scene that Toogood designed with the Brooklyn-based manufacturer Calico. In the center of the room, a giant glazed 19th-century display cabinet, which once sat in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, holds a collection of antique French plaster mushrooms that Toogood purchased from a friend's father. A life-size Carrara marble sculpture of a coat from the clothing line that Toogood designs with her sister, Erica, stands against the far wall, casting a slightly eerie specter. To the right is the dining room, where the 19th-century French mahogany dining table is surrounded by a set of Gio Ponti Superleggera chairs. Devoid of electric lighting, the room is flooded with sun during the day from the large French doors that open onto the lawn. At night, the egg yolk-hued walls — painted in a custom Farrow & Ball color called Toogood Earth — glow with candlelight during frequent dinner parties with weekend guests. Though Toogood says that she wanted to avoid making the home feel like a showroom, its size made dipping into her archive a necessity. 'This house swallows up furniture,' she says. Near the end of renovations, she filled a truck with pieces, including a crystal version of her signature Roly-Poly chair and one of her hand-carved oak Plot I coffee tables — both of which are now in the sitting room, providing a contemporary counterpoint to the 1960s Holland & Sons sofa and canvas Marcel Breuer club chair, which once belonged to Gibberd's grandfather. In the kitchen, a large space at the back of the house that she lined in reclaimed Staffordshire blue tiles, she placed her Roly-Poly table, a 55-inch round fiberglass pedestal where family dinners — planned by Toogood and mostly cooked by Gibberd — are served. Adjacent to the table is what the family refers to as the Pot Room, a glassed-in area dedicated to the white hand-thrown ceramics that Toogood has amassed over the years, some of them everyday dishes, others prized rarities. It's one of several such collections on display: Brown slipware fills a shelved nook off of the mudroom and, in the Flower Room, which is papered in a Colefax and Fowler seaweed print and hung with 19th-century pressed blooms, there are dozens of white biscuit-fired vases designed by the early 20th-century florist Constance Spry for London's Fulham Pottery. 'I've always made sense of the world through collecting,' says Toogood. 'Living with Matt has refined these collections down, but the disease is still there.' For the girls, the most exciting aspect of their home is upstairs: At the far end of a landing, what appears to be a deep shelf set into the wall and stocked with seashells and pink British lusterware is actually a hidden 'Scooby Doo' door, as they call it, leading to the couple's shared dressing room. To enter, one must hop over an 11-inch-high, 15-inch-deep slab, which — they discovered during renovations — is essentially the structure's central lintel. Like much of the house, it's made from an early form of concrete known as no fines, mixed from fragments of flint and fish bones rather than sand. In the Victorian era, the material was extremely rare, considered the height of innovation. The family's new home, it turns out, was more on brand than they'd initially believed. 'It's irrefutably an English country house,' says Gibberd, 'but it has a real modernity to it.'
BBC News
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Rats' paintings sold to people around the world
A veterinary nurse's pet rats have been creating mini paintings which are being sold to people around the rodents, who are owned by Somerset resident Steph Toogood, make the art by walking through sell for up to £35 per canvas and have been helping to shift people's opinions of Toogood, 26, said: "A lot of people have come to me and said that what I do with the photos I share has changed their perception of rats, which is lovely to hear." Ms Toogood first started owning rats in 2016 after her father died and she found them a "huge comfort".But it was only after one of her pet rats passed away a couple of years later that she came up with the idea of rat art."The rats started creating art - in 2018 after I lost one of my rat, Captain Jack Sparrow," she said."I took his paw prints and wanted something for my current boys to create which I would keep to treasure and so I found some mini canvases, and the boys got to work." Since then hundreds of mini masterpieces and other rat-related products have been made and sold online to people across the can also choose which rodent artist they would like to create their paintings."When I first started my business, I had 12 boys who were involved in painting," Ms Toogood said."I now have five bucks [male rats] and 11 does [female rats], 12 of whom paint."The rats that don't paint aren't on the commissions list either for health reasons, they're too young, or they just don't enjoy it," she added. Using non toxic water-based paint, the mini Pawcassos are placed in a bath and guided through the paint on to miniature canvas."The rats are trained to follow my hand and treats," she said."The rats are never forced to run through paint, if they show any signs of unwillingness on the day, we stop." Ms Toogood also has a "rattery account" on Instagram, which shows what the pets get up to on a day-to-day basis."I think that photographs help to capture how cute rats really are and show a different side to them, and that domesticated rats are in fact very different to their wild counterpart," she added.
