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GSLIS lends a hand to Hubbard Street Dance

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When Hubbard Street Dance Chicago celebrates its 35th anniversary next year, many people will be interested in browsing the company’s extensive archive of performances, rehearsals and special events.

It’s something that wouldn’t be possible, says Hubbard Street general manager Kristen Brogdon, without the help of students from Dominican University’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science, who are sorting through hundreds of hours of footage and organizing the archives in a user-friendly system.

Without the resource of a full-time audio-visual specialist to collect, organize and catalog footage, the extensive collection has become difficult to navigate.

“Over the years, we’ve amassed so much video in so many different formats and different versions,” Brogdon says. “For us to be able to find a way to organize and really make that material useful to us and to other people who want to learn more about the work is incredibly important.”

Hubbard Street began recording its performances when the technology became available in the late 1980s, Brogdon says. But as the years progressed, the company expanded its video archives to include rehearsals of the main company as well as its second company, Hubbard Street 2. It became an important tool for teaching dance because of its relative simplicity compared to expensive and complicated dance notation systems.

“Video is an immensely valuable tool for the dance world,” Brogdon says. “We use video for every single work that we do, both in the process of studying the work and teaching the work.”

Directors record rehearsals to help dancers refine precise technique. It’s also invaluable to technical directors setting the stage for shows, and the marketing department loves to tease potential audiences with a taste of what will be presented in live shows.

The video archive includes hundreds of recordings captured in many different media, including VHS tapes, mini-DV tapes and DVDs. All found their way onto shelves in room 211 at the company’s headquarters at 1147 West Jackson Street –but not necessarily in any order.

“I had been here about two weeks when I started to take on the task of organizing the collection, and the DVDs were just everywhere. I was new, and I had no idea where anything was, and people before me didn’t know where anything was,” says Quinlan Kyp-Johnson, a Hubbard Street intern who tried to tackle the task of organizing the collection. “There were so many options: chronological, alphabetical, cross-referencing different things. I didn’t even know how to start the process.”

After getting in touch with Dr. Cecilia Salvatore, associate professor of library and information science and coordinator of the school’s certificate in archives and cultural heritage resources and services, Hubbard Street had four eager assistants on the job within two weeks.

“Our goal is to improve the database so that it’s usable, give them a finding aid so it’s easier to locate things and provide more detailed information for each item in the collection,” Salvatore says. “It’s a project that the students will be able to say they completed from start to finish.”

The class also will produce a manual for the company to outline the process for maintaining the archive into the future.

“This is what I want to be doing, working in the field,” says James Sherman, a student in the master’s degree in library and information science program at Dominican. “It’s great that we had this opportunity so that we’re actually able to spend the time working here rather than sitting in a classroom.”

It’s work that’s required hours of watching footage, careful construction of cataloging notes and detailed data entry. During those hours of searching through unknown footage – the group assembles for three hours every Thursday – the archivists were sure to unearth some interesting pieces of cultural history.

One unlabeled tape revealed a rare early-90’s Hubbard Street performance at a Chicago Bulls game.

“While you might not expect to see such a highly trained dance company performing at a sporting event, it does make sense,” says Sherman, who is also an accomplished playwright and writing teacher. “They were a young dance company at that point, and they would have wanted to get in front of as many audiences as possible.”

No telling if the Bulls game performance will become one of the prized performances in the annals of a company whose history includes commissioned works by celebrated choreographers such as Margo Sappington, Lynne Taylor-Corbett and Twyla Tharp. That might depend on what else the archivists turn up.

“Creating databases means dealing with a lot of information and a lot of time spent in front of the computer,” Sherman says. “But you get to see a lot of these old recordings of pieces by famous choreographers. We’re actually watching the history of this world-renowned company, so it’s pretty cool.”