Hubbard Street Invites Audiences To Take A More Intimate Look At The Company

From the Chicago Tribune last week.

Dancers are also archivists
By Lucia Mauro
Special to the Tribune

April 8, 2007

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago ensemble members Cheryl Mann and Tobin Del Cuore are well-known on-stage partners. But they've also carried their playful chemistry into unusual backstage roles as the modern troupe's archivists. What may sound like a stuffy job becomes creative magic in their unconventional hands.

More recently, in addition to their demanding dance schedules, Mann has honed her portrait-photography skills and Del Cuore his interest in videography. The pair collaborated on a video, "The Dancers of Hubbard Street," to be shown during the company's gala in conjunction with its spring engagement running Wednesday through April 22 at the Harris Theater in Millennium Park.

Set to a hip beat, with the dancers warmly poking fun at themselves, the video begins with close-ups of their faces that seem to morph through their tightly shut eyelashes. Mann and Del Cuore set up the personality-revealing shots. They include: Terence Marling chomping on a heart-shaped cookie, Sarah Cullen Fuller luxuriating on a bed of tabloids, Robyn Mineko Williams stabbing a chocolate layer cake with Hitchcockian relish, and Brian Enos wriggling around in a bright-orange unitard before changing into goth-inspired clothing.

"I've always, always loved photography," says Mann, 34. "I would spend a lot of time looking at our family photo albums, especially black-and-white photos of my mom, who was a rock singer in Vietnam."

While recovering from an injury in 1999, she picked up her Canon and began taking photos of the dancers from the wings. In 2001, Mann had her first gallery show at the Arts Club of Chicago and has since exhibited around the city. She specializes in candid portraits of dancers -- some in motion; others celebrating stillness, laughter or reflection. Most of her images line the walls of Hubbard Street's offices.

"I want to be able to get to know the people I'm photographing and make them comfortable," says Mann, who was born in Knoxville, Tenn. "It's not just me holding a camera and expecting them to look good. It's a collaboration."

When Mann convinced Del Cuore to buy a computer, he finally was able to expand his video-production talents. A native of Norway, Maine, he says he once considered a career in graphic arts and recalls making music videos and doing filmed newscasts at home as a child with his brother.

"I like the balance of giving people direction and surprising them when they think the camera isn't on," says Del Cuore, 28.

Del Cuore joined the main company in 2003 after two years in Hubbard Street 2. In a short period of time, he also has videotaped a series of "Travelogues" that track Hubbard Street on tour. They show the gamut of a dancer's life: the drudgery of living out of a suitcase, injury, close friendships and the joy of performing.

Mann joined the ensemble in 1997. Both she and Del Cuore have been consistently praised as dancers with exquisite technique, measured calm and ego-free confidence -- qualities they apply to their visual-art careers. As dancers, they bring a unique sensitivity to their subjects.

"My favorite shot is the last bow a dancer takes from the side of the stage when they leave the company," Mann says. "There's something special about documenting the close of a chapter in their lives."

View their tour diaries and a slide show of behind the scenes snapshots at Hubbard Street's website here.

Starting from Scratch? Three Website Solutions

I'm a regular reader of Web Worker Daily, and their post from today, "Microsoft Offers Free Domains and Web Space" is a must read if you're trying to get a web site up and running:

If you are a new start-up, where do you look to, to get your online presence started? You want to do it right, but sometimes there isn’t a lot of time to search companies out. Every day you aren’t online could mean the lose of potential customers. So why not try out a temporary solution until you find the right parties that can help you out at website development?

Microsoft has started offering a free small business solution that includes a free domain name. The new service called Office Live Basics gives users a free domain name with web hosting, web site design tools, 500MB of web storage, 25 email accounts, web site reports, and search engine advertising tools. Not bad for a business, or personal user just starting up. If you aren’t happy with Microsoft’s free offering, you can choose to upgrade to a $19.95/month, or a $29.95/ month account, each with more space.

GoDaddy also has some great offers for starting up online. For every domain you purchase at $8.95 through them, GoDaddy offers a blog platform, hosting with a website builder, email with a 25MB limit, 100 email forwards, and a website builder where you can build a five page website or upload your own designs. With GoDaddy, you can forward the domain name to you own web hosting supplier whenever you like, whereas with Microsoft’s solution, you must wait six months.

Other programs like these are out there to help small businesses, just make sure they are from a reputable company, the domain name you choose is registered in your name, and you can update the DNS records to point to another server down the line when you are ready to expand.

This is all good advice (and props to Chris Gillmer and the folks at WWD for their smart and engaging blog) - and for folks exploring this territory for the first time I think reading the descriptions above gets you a good idea of what kind of packages to look for when finding a web hosting and design solution. For the average artist, presenter, or manager, however, I think the GoDaddy interface is a little overwhelming, and the Office Live Basics package has overly restrictive requirements (only operates using Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows Server 2003).

Instead, for music-focused organizations, I highly recommend Hostbaby.com, which is part of Derek Sivers' CDbaby family and shares the same ethic: simple, direct, smart services for music folks. With hostbaby you get tools for building a website including a concert calendar, email list mailer, streaming audio, guest book, a news page, 500 MB of disk space, as many private email accounts as you want, spam-blocker, and webmail. All of it runs on their trademark foolproof wizard interface, and there really is no experience necessary to make a fully functional professional looking website. It's a $20/month flat fee, comes with excellent tech support, and to help get you started they'll transfer your existing site to their servers for free.

Quick, Free Tools to Measure Internet Links to Your Arts Org's Website

Even if you are no computer or programming wiz, there is an easy-to-use and fun tool for seeing how well-linked your art organization's website is to other websites and major search engines. Wouldn't you like to know how well your website is positioned on the search engines compared to a similar organization in your market or city? Or what about comparing your website's position to a similar arts organization in another city of your size? With one quick search you can also find out whether your website comes up in the top three search results for a specific keyword in all the major search engines. At no cost, and only a few minutes of your time, you can compare how popular your website is compared to others.

These free services are available from Marketleap and are an easy way to start benchmarking how well your website is positioned to perform. Below are further details about each of the three tools. Try them out!

Link popularity check is a great way to quantifiably and independently measure your website's online awareness and overall visibility. Simply put, link popularity refers to the total number of links or "votes" that a search engine has found for your website. Marketleap has designed this link popularity tool to help website owners find out who is linking to their site, but also to give a useful benchmarking report to quickly show where you stand in comparison to competitors and other major online players.

Search Engine Saturation simply refers to the number of pages a given search engine has in its index for your website domain. Not all search engines report this information but enough of them do to create some meaningful benchmarks for your search engine marketing campaigns.

Keyword Verification--Marketleap's verification tool--checks to see if your site is in the top three pages of a search engine result for a specific keyword. Some marketing experts say it's important to be in the top three pages of a search result because many people using search engines don't go past the third page.

Have fun with this!