The Cowles Center for Dance and the Performing Arts (formerly the Minnesota Shubert Performing Arts and Education Center) is a performing arts center and flagship for dance in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Cowles Center was developed as an incubation project by Artspace Projects, Inc and includes the refurbished 500-seat Goodale Theater (formerly the Sam S. Shubert Theater); the Hennepin Center for the Arts, home to 20 leading dance and performing arts organizations; a state-of-the-art education studio housing a distance learning program; and an atrium connecting the buildings. The Cowles Center is a catalyst for the creation, presentation and education of dance in the Twin Cities. Both the Goodale Theater and the Hennepin Center for the Arts (formerly the Minneapolis Masonic Temple) are on the National Register of Historic Places. The distance learning program began teaching students in 2002. Using IP videoconferencing technologies, it brings artists into classrooms throughout Minnesota, nationally and internationally, creating two-way interactive, real-time teaching environments. Original Samuel S. Shubert Theater The Shubert Theatrical Company, run by brothers Levi, Samuel, and Jacob, entered the New York theater scene in 1900 and had become the largest theater owning and producing organization in America by 1920. When Samuel Shubert died in a train wreck in 1905, his brothers memorialized him by naming a few of their new theaters after him. Two of these new theaters opened on the same day in 1910: Saint Paul’s Shubert Theater, which became the Fitzgerald Theater in 1994, and The Samuel S. Shubert Theater in Minneapolis, which reopened as The Cowles Center for Dance and the Performing Arts in September 2011, after a long and dramatic history. The Samuel S. Shubert Theater was designed by William Albert Swasey (1864–1940). For its time it was a mid-sized house, consisting of 1,500 seats with two shallow balconies. The front of the building had a Classical Revival façade featuring four pairs of bas-relief columns framing three arched windows at the second-story level. As with many of Swasey’s other buildings, the decorative elements of the façade were made of glazed terra cotta. The opening show at Minneapolis’ new Samuel S. Shubert Theatre was The White Sister starring Viola Allen. Ticket prices ranged from $2.50 to 50 cents. Alexander G. “Buzz” Bainbridge, a former press agent for Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and general manager for a Chicago producer of touring shows, became the Shubert's manager in 1910,