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Houston Ballet’s Golden Anniversary LGBTQ artists have played an integral role in the company’s development. Phillip Broomhead, pictured here as the Prince in The Sleeping Beauty, emerged as one of Houston Ballet’s most popular stars in the 1990s.
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urning 50 is a milestone that can be fraught with conflicting emotions: exhilaration at having reached a significant life passage, anxiety about the loss of youth, and satisfaction at having amassed the hard-earned wisdom that life brings. Whatever ambivalent feelings Houston Ballet may have had about turning 50, none of them were on display when the company launched its golden-anniversary season in September at Wortham Theater Center. Its performances of artistic director Stanton Welch’s staging of Giselle displayed a company in peak form, with the corps de ballet looking especially polished and precise. The stellar debuts of younger dancers Nozomi Iijima as Giselle and Chun Wai Chan as Albrecht bode well for the company’s future, signaling that there are rising young classical stars poised to carry the company forward. At the end of September, Houston Ballet showcased a different side of its dancers in the mixed-repertory program Locally Grown, 52 NOVEMBER 2019 | OutSmartMagazine.com
GEOFF WINNINGHAM
By ANDREW EDMONSON
World Renowned, which demonstrated their mastery of more contemporary works. And in October, the company headed to Manhattan, the dance capital of the world, to perform at New York City Center, a hallowed venue that they last visited three decades ago. Houston Ballet has come a long way since its humble beginnings in 1955 as a school offering ballet classes for children in a converted Montrose garage at 813 Lovett Boulevard. Today, Houston Ballet has a $33 million budget, 59 dancers, a $70 million endowment, and is America’s fifth-largest ballet company. Over the last decade it has toured to Paris, Germany, Los Angeles, Dubai, and Australia. On Friday, December 6, the company will throw itself a grand 50th birthday party with The Margaret Alkek Williams Jubilee of Dance. This annual gala performance typically packs a wallop of high-octane choreography, with all of the company’s stars featured in short works designed to show off their unique talents and pieces d’occasion. This year, the jubilee will celebrate key chapters in the company’s history, including the early years of the 1950s and 1960s when Tatiana Semenova (a
former dancer with the Ballet Russe) methodically trained local children to be dancers, and the company’s salad days when it grew from a regional troupe to gain national prominence under the artistic direction of Ben Stevenson from 1976 to 2003. The jubilee will include special appearances by Stevenson, James Clouser (who served as interim director of the company from 1975 to 1976), and other VIPs. The evening will have a multimedia component, and also feature a performance of the grand classical showpiece Paquita, which the company first danced in the early 1970s. The first act of the jubilee closes with a new work. The ballet’s 50th-anniversary jubilee event will be a highly emotional one as it welcomes backs dancers from the last 50 years for an alumni weekend—a family reunion of sorts, with public discussions and other events planned. On Saturday, December 7, at 5:00 p.m., a panel discussion with Stanton Welch and company artists from over the years, Celebrating 50 Years of Creativity, will be held at the Houston Ballet Center for Dance at 601 Preston Street.
