Jeanne Ruddy Dance is folding

After 12 years of creating dance, commissioning work from world-class choreographers, and opening a theater and studio in a converted mechanic's shop, former Martha Graham principal dancer Jeanne Ruddy announced Monday that she was folding her Philadelphia modern dance company.

"I came to the decision that it was time for me to move on, and that I had done what it was that I had set out to do," Ruddy, 58, said in her office at the Performance Garage on Brandywine Street.

She paused frequently to get her emotions in check, and drew her long, dark-blond hair up in a clip several times, before pulling it down again moments later.

"I've had cycles in my life. I was a decade with Martha Graham. Then I was nine years on the faculty of Juilliard and Ailey. And then I started this cycle, and it's 12 years now, and I want to go on to doing individual artist projects, and I'd like to be able to accept guest-artist invitations. I had some writing projects I'd like to return to."

Ruddy said her decision, which she mulled for 18 months, had nothing to do with the health of either Jeanne Ruddy Dance or herself, both of which she described as strong.

But the company was born out of her own brush with mortality. In the summer of 1999, she created and performed Significant Soil, which in its first incarnation was a solo - a lifeline after she was treated for breast cancer the year before. By December, she had filed paperwork to start Jeanne Ruddy Dance.

"There was a very strong feeling in me that if I got past the cancer, that I hadn't finished the exploration of the choreography that I had always been extremely interested in since I was young.

"But once I went to New York and I was in the Graham company, though I did do some choreography there it was a complete dedication to your work with Martha. It was absolutely, totally absorbing to be a member and then a principal dancer with Martha. The travel, the lifestyle, the hours - it really left little time for much of anything else, including relationships, having anything extra in your life."

Her own company is similarly demanding.

"I have been completely immersed in it for the last 12 years," she said, "so it is with complex feelings that I go forward with this decision, and I will miss greatly many aspects of the company: Working in the studio with the dancers, many of whom have been with me for eight to 10 years, are very precious hours, and they do become a family, so there will be great sadness in that, in not seeing them every day. But I need to get on and do some things as an artist that are different.

"It's a big responsibility to have a company," she added, "and it doesn't always allow for the flexibility to do individual artistic projects or be able to accept invitations that come or to do just about anything else - cooking dinner."

Lois Welk, director of the support organization Dance/USA Philadelphia, lamented the company's departure from the local scene.

"I am deeply grateful to Jeanne Ruddy Dance," she said Monday. "For 12 years, Jeanne has shared her artistry and her dreams with the Philadelphia dance community. And that has been a very big gift for the community, because of the robust commissioning program that she believed in. She gave her local Philadelphia dancers the opportunity to work with some world-renowned choreographers."

Over the years, Jeanne Ruddy dancers have worked with such bright lights as Mark Dendy, Jane Comfort, Martha Clarke, Ann Reinking, Robert Battle, and Igal Perry.

"She's been so generous and so inspiring," Welk said, "and she inspires the community's connection to Martha Graham. She is a crucible for a legacy."

As for the company's health, it has always been relatively good, said Greg Gosfield, president of the troupe's board of directors. "We've been able to operate the company in a way that we've almost always been at least break-even. Some years have been better than others; [2011] is our strongest fiscal year we've ever had. We have great reserves."

In 2010, Gosfield said, the operating budget was $385,000. This year's number is harder to calculate, because it will have to include closing costs along with the operating expenses.

Before Ruddy lets go, she will spend nine months "unwinding" the troupe. The dancers - 13, including guest artists - will continue to rehearse for the company's final season, scheduled for May 10 to 12 at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre, in which Ruddy will dance. Then come three months of archiving the choreography, photos, videos, Ruddy's notebooks, and related items. The process should be completed by August, the end of the troupe's fiscal year.

"From a dancer's point of view, that's something that's close to my heart," Ruddy said of the archival work, "because I had to restage many of Martha Graham's historic works. In her era, all they had were these little films that were on 8mm film. And I was in studios where I had to get a little projector and thread the film in. We'd have to go back over and over to learn a phrase of movement.

"And after a while, the film would break, so we had to learn how to splice the film, to fix it right there in the studio. And then there'd be that little section that was gone. And you never knew how that dancer got from stage right to stage left, because it was gone.

"So I have a very special feeling in my heart to make sure there are no questions about that if anyone gets involved with restaging."

Ruddy, who moved to Philadelphia in 1993 when her husband, Victor Keen, a lawyer, took a job here, plans to stay. The fate of the Performance Garage, which the couple own, will be decided later.

Dance companies come and go, but they rarely go out on top. Yet Ruddy decided to close her company rather than hand it over to someone else.

"Well, it's a little awkward when a company is named after yourself and you haven't died," she said. "I don't have a model for that. I just don't.

"This is not a Steve Jobs moment," she added, smiling. "I'm just fine, and that's a good thing, because then I can achieve those new things, those reinventing-self kinds of projects that I can still do and have ahead of me."