A great leap for the Cowles Center

If a 100-year-old building could leap and pirouette in midair, the Cowles Center for Dance would surely do so next weekend.

After years of struggle, the long-hoped-for and much-talked-about flagship venue for Twin Cities dance is opening. Tap dance superstar Savion Glover, National Endowment for the Arts chairman Rocco Landesman and New York City prima ballerina Wendy Whalen are on tap to join other movers and muckety-mucks for the ribbon-cutting festivities.

"It's like childbirth -- you see the beautiful child and you forget about the labor and delivery," said Kimberly Motes, who led the Shubert project for seven years and is now vice president at the College of St. Benedict. "As the mother of three children, I can tell you that this took some doing to give birth to."

Call it a 12-year delivery. The project's labor pains started in 1999, when all 6 million pounds of the 1910 Shubert Theater, an abandoned former vaudeville and burlesque house on a block slated for redevelopment, were cut from their foundation, hoisted onto 70 rubber-tired dollies and slowly rolled a block and a half to its new location alongside the Hennepin Center for the Arts.

The move, which cost nearly $5 million and pleased preservationists and cultural enthusiasts alike, won a place in the Guinness Book of World Records (heaviest building ever moved on rubber tires). The dream was for a Shubert reborn as a sparkling downtown performance center.

As seasons came and went, the building sat like a forlorn white elephant. Its owner, nonprofit developer Artspace Properties, sought support from the Legislature, but was repeatedly set back as other big culture-related buildings, including the Guthrie and the downtown Minneapolis library, took precedence. The project finally found success at the Legislature, securing $12 million in bonding money in 2005 and 2006. That seal of approval helped to reassure wait-and-see corporate, foundation and philanthropic donors.

Still, it continued to struggle. An early design for a new atrium between Hennepin Center for the Arts and the Shubert was scaled back. Announced groundbreaking dates were shifted. Architects were changed. The Shubert was found to be structurally unsound; only three walls and the stately terra cotta facade remain. A big boost arrived in 2009, when the shovel-ready project received $2 million in federal stimulus funding.

"No question it was difficult, but I never had any doubts that we would succeed," said L. Kelley Lindquist, head of Artspace.

Lindquist never said never

The opening of the Cowles Center, a $42 million project that includes an atrium, a distance learning center and the extant Hennepin Center for the Arts, is a testament to Lindquist's tenacity. By his own admission, he nurtured a vision born 25 years ago when he was on the board of what would become Zenon Dance.

"Kelley asked what he could do for us, and I said we need a theater for dance, a grand place that would be on par with the Guthrie and Walker and Orchestra [Hall]," said Zenon founder Linda Andrews. "I'm sure other people had similar ideas, and I knew it would be hard, but not this hard."

Lindquist said he expected to achieve his goals because of his earliest stalwart backers: center namesakes John and Sage Cowles (former owners and publishers of the Star Tribune), the Sewell family and the McKnight Foundation.

A check of the capital-campaign donors shows support from the leading families of the Twin Cities, including Daytons, Pohlads and Blythe Brenden of the theater-owning Ted and Roberta Mann family.

The marquee at the theater bears the Cowles name. Inside, U.S. Bank has its name on a light-filled atrium. Target is in, as well. And there are naming opportunities still available, said Frank Sonntag, who was recruited after Motes as executive director of the center.

Changed arts ecology

The Shubert-Cowles project began in the heady days of an arts building boom in the Twin Cities, with the Guthrie, Walker and Children's Theatre all part of a half-billion dollars in capital expenditures. Now the Cowles is opening at a time of chastened ambitions. Arts groups, like families and businesses nationwide, are reeling from the effects of a long-lasting economic downturn.

Compounding the down economy are the paltry resources allocated to dance. The combined annual budgets of all Twin Cities dance companies are $7 million to $8 million, said John Munger, former director of research at the industry organ DanceUSA. By comparison, the Children's Theatre's current annual budget is $9.5 million, while the Guthrie's is more than $23 million.

To encourage companies and to make the Cowles accessible, center officials plan to subsidize the rent for troupes in its inaugural year.

"We'll do that the first year, then we'll see," said Sonntag. The announced season includes most of the major dance companies in the Twin Cities, from Minnesota Dance Theatre and James Sewell Ballet to Zenon and Arena Dance.

The new venue meets the goal of being "both august and intimate," said Ranee Ramaswamy, whose company, Ragamala Dance Theater, inaugurates the Cowles with a world premiere Sept. 23.