Houston Ballet Features CINDERELLA, GISELLE, et al. in 2011

Houston Ballet Artistic Director Stanton Welch has announced the company's 2011-2012 season.  Four new works enter Houston Ballet's repertoire, including world premieres by Stanton Welch in March 2012 and Nicolo Fonte in May 2012, company premiere of Mark Morris's Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes, as well as a new staging of Giselle by the Kirov-trained dancer Ai-Gul Gaisina in September 2011.

"The 2011-2012 season is very exciting. We have reached a milestone in Houston Ballet's history, and we will be ushering in a new era with our move into the Center for Dance in the spring of 2011," comments Mr. Welch.  "We have three of the most famous, beautiful, and moving story ballets - Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella, and Giselle.  Our orchestra will also play two great scores by Prokofiev in Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet, which makes for exciting performances musically as well."  

In a move designed to propel Houston Ballet to the next phase of its development, the company broke ground on July 15, 2009 on the Center for Dance, a new 115,000 square-foot facility located in downtown Houston. The $48 million building's grand opening will be April 9, 2011. The six-story building will boast nine dance studios, a dance laboratory for presentations as well as rehearsals, and artistic, administrative and support facilities for Houston Ballet and its academy.  The new facility will more than double the space that Houston Ballet has at its current home, and become the largest professional dance company facility in the United States.

About Houston Ballet

On February 17, 1969 a troupe of 15 young dancers made its stage debut at Sam Houston State Teacher's College in Huntsville, Texas.  Since that time, Houston Ballet has evolved into a company of 54 dancers with a budget of $18.4 million, a state-of-the-art performance space built especially for the company, Wortham Theater Center,  and an endowment of just over $47 million (as of June 2010), making it the United States' fourth largest ballet company by number of dancers.  Under the administrative leadership of managing director C.C. Conner since 1995, the company has maintained a strong financial position.  

Houston Ballet has toured extensively both nationally and internationally.  Over the last decade, the company has appeared in London at Sadler's Wells, at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, in six cities in Spain, in Montreal, at The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in New York at City Center, and in cities large and small across the United States.  

Houston Ballet has emerged as a leader in the expensive, labor-intensive task of nurturing the creation and development of new full-length narrative ballets.  The company has also commissioned new one-act ballets from some of the world's most respected choreographers, including Julia Adam, Christopher Bruce, James Kudelka, Trey McIntyre, Paul Taylor, Glen Tetley, Natalie Weir and Lila York.

Writing in The Financial Times on March 6, 2006, dance critic Hilary Ostlere praised Houston Ballet as "a strong, reinvigorated company whose male contingent is particularly impressive, a well-drilled corps and an enviable selection of soloists and principals."  Dance Europe editor Emma Manning observed of the company in November 2004, "One of the first things that hits you about this company is the technical strengths not just of the principals, but throughout the ranks. Watching artistic director Stanton Welch take class on a Sunday morning before a matinee, one could not help but marvel at the multiple turns tossed off by the young women in the corps....The three new works shown in this program will be followed by no fewer than four more Houston premieres.  Can any other major ballet company in the world match that?"

Houston Ballet Academy has reached over 19,000 Houston area students (as of the 2009-2010 season) and has had four academy students win prizes at the prestigious international ballet competition the Prix de Lausanne, with one student winning the overall competition in 2010.

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