In the good old days, when Hubbard Street Dance Chicago still lived on Hubbard Street, founder Lou Conte remembers times when he and the dancers would show up for work to find the building’s elevator inoperable.
No big deal–these were young, strong dancer-athletes, after all. So up he and his charges climbed, all seven flights, often only to find that their toilet was malfunctioning too. “Every fall we had trouble persuading the landlord to pay his gas bill,” Conte remembers. “He’d drag his feet all fall, so I finally took to setting up a space heater on the dance floor so we could rehearse through November. By then, he paid the bill.”
The company moved from the corner of Hubbard and LaSalle Streets in 1981 to its current quarters at 218 S. Wabash Ave. They are forever grateful, though it has been no paradise there either. The elevator and heating works, but the quarters have space for only three studios, which also accommodate the Lou Conte Dance School, and the dancers share one large room for relaxing and changing their clothes. Even the costume fitting area is so centrally located that, when workmen or technical staff are around, someone sometimes shouts, “Naked dancers back here. Stay away.”
Ah, but that was then. On Wednesday, the Hubbard Streeters cut the ribbon on the one-time Ruby Chevrolet showroom at 1147 W. Jackson St., the result of a one-year, $3 million purchase and renovation effort over much of the past year. No more will a malfunctioning toilet wreak havoc: The 350 or so who work and study at the studio and school are going from five toilet fixtures to 18.
More importantly, Chicago’s most widely acclaimed home-grown dance troupe now boasts headquarters in a state-of-the-art, intricately designed and magnificent looking facility, arguably among the top five in homes for dance companies in the U.S.
“To tell you the truth, I’m still a little numb,” says Conte, artistic director for the troupe’s 20-year history. “This is like adult, big-time stuff. I’m amazed to think we’ve worked the way we’ve worked all these years.”
Hubbard’s 35,000-square-feet of the two-story building (another 15,000 square feet will go to a retail tenant) contains five studios for the company and school compared with only three in the current Wabash offices. Moreover, the new studios, like the facility as a whole, have been fashioned (working with the architectural firm of Harry Weese Associates) to answer requests accumulated by dancers, choreographers and students over the years.
“We’d done so much bitching that when it came time to meet with the architects, the ideas flowed,” says Conte.
The studios themselves, for instance, are much larger and now allow room for choreographers to step back and view their works in the rehearsal space as if in an actual theater. (Currently, dancemakers scrunch up against the wall.) But now, in Studio A, the flagship studio, the 66-by-42-foot dimensions are larger than any stage on which Hubbard performs. Choreographers and even guests can watch comfortably from in front, while there’s plenty of room on each side to serve as imaginary wing space.
That improvement alone saves Hubbard a lot of money as well as discomfort. Currently, choreographers have to stage their work in the studio and then spend several hours adapting it to a real stage, which costs extra in terms of stage rental and labor costs. “Anything that saves time,” says lighting designer Todd Clark, “saves money.” Some of the details seem minor, but aren’t. All the mirrors in the new studios go down to the floor–in the current facilities, they don’t. Dancers have to bend to weird angles sometimes just to see their feet.
The studios include separate male and female dressing rooms and showers for both company members and students; a separate costume shop with its own private dressing area; a sound recording studio; scads of offices, including a guest one for visiting choreographers. (Now they grab a phone or desk wherever available.)
Most importantly, for Clark, who along with production stage manager Jonathan Ledden spent much of the past year working on site during the renovation while continuing their other duties (“Don’t ask me how many days I’ve had off”), there is a large production shop next to an indoor loading dock. For years, Clark has had to squeeze trucks into a small alley on Wabash and then go and pick up additional equipment stored at Steppenwolf Theatre and elsewhere in the city.
“We can load two tractor trailers side by side in the new docks,” Clark boasts. “I worked at 218 S. Wabash for 11 years and managed just about every conceivable configuration you can think of, in snow, in rain, on a ramp with awkward angles that ices up part of the time.”
One of the niftiest features of the building is its organization. From the front reception area, the marketing and other public-oriented services lead to backstage administrative staff and finally to the dancers and technical area. The set-up roughly duplicates that of a theater, from the lobby to backstage. But the arrangement is more than a nicety. It will enable the company to shut off the back area when the troupe’s on tour and save on heating and air-conditioning, roughly a quarter of the year.
That’s part of the key plan to enable the company to make the move financially, an undertaking spearheaded by board member and former chair William N. Wood Prince. Though now there’s a mortgage, operating expenses won’t climb more than 10 percent. (Hubbard’s annual budget is now $3.8 million, which includes its merger with the formerly separate school.) A $6 million fundraising campaign, now in its final stages, is not only financing the building and construction but allows for artistic investment and the creation of a $1 million endowment, the company’s first.
The school, which is turning from for-profit to not-for-profit by merging with the dance group, will also expand to add children’s classes in tap, modern, jazz and ballet to what is now mostly preprofessional classes for older students. Moreover, Hubbard is suddenly a key player in West Side redevelopment, becoming both a landlord and a new neighbor this week. Gail Kalver, Hubbard’s executive director, whose 15 years with the troupe began when she took some classes herself, has joined the arts council of the West Loop Gate Association and is working as well with the West Central Association, a business group.
“I hope this all results in higher ambitions creatively,” says Conte. “For me, the most important thing in the immediate future will be that we’ll have two or three working studios so we can work more efficiently and create more smaller works. We need duets, trios and quartets to balance our program of larger pieces.”
For now, the building is a gleaming, almost antiseptic dance palace waiting for the royal arrival–and the troops. “Now, we’ve got to get in there,” Conte says, “and make it ours.”
