Sur la pointe

Houston Ballet's 2011-12 season combines familiar works & contemporaryinterpretations

Artists of Houston Ballet in "Giselle," choreographed by Ai-Gul Gaisina, bringsa different interpretation of the popular story dealing with deceit, forgivenessand salvation.
Photo by Amitava Sarkar
Artist Nozomi Iijima in "Divergence," choreographed by Stanton Welch
Photo by Amitava Sarkar
Choreographed by Ben Stevenson, "Romeo & Juliet," with artists Joseph Walsh andKarina Gonzalez
Photo by Amitava Sarkar
Melody Herrera & Connor Walsh in "Cinderella," choreographed by Stanton Welchset to Sergey Prokofiev's music.
Photo by Amitava Sarkar

Tis’ the season to announce the season.

And in that spirit, the Houston Ballet released its line up for 2011-12. The highlights? Four new works, world premieres by Stanton Welch and Nicolo Fonte, a company premiere of Mark Morris’s Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes and a new staging of the lovely Giselle. For non-ballet goers, this is a line-up that could increase the organization's subscriber base as it contains a healthy mix of familiar works with new and contemporary interpretations.

Houston is one of a few cities that boasts a full-time symphony, opera, theater and ballet companies. For that, we stand proud, sur la pointe. But in typical Texas-style, we like things bigger and better. In this case, not just bigger but the biggest professional dance building in the country. The Houston Ballet's massive Center for Dance, a new 115,000 square-foot facility, is set to open this spring.

The $53 million dollar investment in the company's artistic future exemplifies a larger attitude in our city: We care about, fund and believe in the arts, with the feeling that they are essential to the economic and cultural well-being and development of Houston.

The season opens in September with the Return of the Masters. The program consists of pieces that have not been performed in Houston for a decade and have specific significance in ballet history and the company in general.

The repertoire includes Ashton's Les Patineurs, MacMillan's Song of the Earth and Robbins' In the Night. Ecuadorian born and raised in Peru, Sir Frederick Ashton's one-act Les Patineurs, literally, "the skaters," depicts a graceful, romantic and pretty waltz on an ice-covered pond. Set to Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, Sir Kenneth MacMillan's Song of the Earth is rarely performed in America. Based on a Chinese poem from the 8th century T'ang Dynasty, it's a story of renewal and the cycle of life and death.

The program ends with Jerome Robbins' In the Night. Having dual carriers in dance and theater, audiences will remember Robbins for Broadway Across America's recent presentation of West Side Story at the Hobby Center. Using some of Chopin's colorful Piano Nocturnes as a musical departure point, Robbins emotionally charged work plays with three couples' state of being, from serenity to aggression.

If Giselle doesn't make you swoon, I don't know what will. Scheduled for mid-September, this new staging by Russian born ballerina Ai-Gul Gaisina, the delicate story deals with deceit, forgiveness and salvation. Although the work was originally premiered in 1841, the story line is universal.

From a historical standpoint, this ballet has a special and formative place in the development of the company. Having been the first full-length work that the original Houston Ballet Foundation staged in 1967, it gave impetus to fund and propel the organization into professional status. The program will conclude with a show of pure dance athleticism with Welch's Indigo (1999), one of the company's signature works.

In the genre of Giselle, Welch modernizes the classic story of Cinderella, which is set to Prokofiev's score and features opulent wigs and luxurious costumes by New Zealand designer Kristian Fredrickson. Performances are scheduled for mid-February to early March 2012.

Also set to Prokofiev's music and scheduled for June 2012, Ben Stevenson's Romeo and Juliet tells the tragic archetypal story of forbidden young love. From a historical perspective, Romeo and Juliet helped the company continue to grow and attain international recognition. The production inaugurated the newly built Wortham Theater Center in1987 and was performed in 1995 in Beijing, making the Houston Ballet the first full American company to perform and tour China.

In Rock, Roll & Tutus, set for February 2012, the Ballet juxtaposes the virile music of The Rolling Stones with the more lyrical tunes of Bizet's L’ Arlésienne. Associate choreographer Christopher Bruce brings back Rooster, a story exploring young confidence and hopelessness, now a signature company work set to “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Paint it Black,” and “Ruby Tuesday,” among other Stones songs. Welch's Divergence plays with the notion of classical dance.

And of course, the holiday season — and the ballet season —would not be a season without the Nutcracker. The single biggest revenue producing production for nearly all ballet companies, the run starts on Nov. 25 through Dec. 27.

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Movie Review

Avatar: Fire and Ash returns to Pandora with big action and bold visuals

Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios

Oona Chaplin in Avatar: Fire and Ash.

For a series whose first two films made over $5 billion combined worldwide, Avatar has a curious lack of widespread cultural impact. The films seem to exist in a sort of vacuum, popping up for their run in theaters and then almost as quickly disappearing from the larger movie landscape. The third of five planned movies, Avatar: Fire and Ash, is finally being released three years after its predecessor, Avatar: The Way of Water.

The new film finds the main duo, human-turned-Na’vi Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his native Na’vi wife, Neytiri (Zoë Saldaña), still living with the water-loving Metkayina clan led by Ronal (Kate Winslet) and Tonowari (Cliff Curtis). While Jake and Neytiri still play a big part, the focus shifts significantly to their two surviving children, Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) and Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), as well as two they’ve essentially adopted, Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) and Spider (Jack Champion).

Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who lives on in a fabricated Na’vi body, is still looking for revenge on Jake, and he finds help in the form of the Mangkwan Clan (aka the Ash People), led by Varang (Oona Chaplin). Quaritch’s access to human weapons and the Mangkwan’s desire for more power on the moon known as Pandora make them a nice match, and they team up to try to dominate the other tribes.

Aside from the story, the main point of making the films for writer/director James Cameron is showing off his considerable technical filmmaking prowess, and that is on full display right from the start. The characters zoom around both the air and sea on various creatures with which they’ve bonded, providing Cameron and his team with plenty of opportunities to put the audience right there with them. Cameron’s preferred viewing method of 3D makes the experience even more immersive, even if the high frame rate he uses makes some scenes look too realistic for their own good.

The story, as it has been in the first two films, is a mixed bag. Cameron and co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver start off well, having Jake, Neytiri, and their kids continue mourning the death of Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) in the previous film. The struggle for power provides an interesting setup, but Cameron and his team seem to drag out the conflict for much too long. This is the longest Avatar film yet, and you really start to feel it in the back half as the filmmakers add on a bunch of unnecessary elements.

Worse than the elongated story, though, is the hackneyed dialogue that Cameron, Jaffa, and Silver have come up with. Almost every main character is forced to spout lines that diminish the importance of the events around them. The writers seemingly couldn’t resist trying to throw in jokes despite them clashing with the tone of the scenes in which they’re said. Combined with the somewhat goofy nature of the Na’vi themselves (not to mention talking whales), the eye-rolling words detract from any excitement or emotion the story builds up.

A pre-movie behind-the-scenes short film shows how the actors act out every scene in performance capture suits, lending an authenticity to their performances. Still, some performers are better than others, with Saldaña, Worthington, and Lang standing out. It’s more than a little weird having Weaver play a 14-year-old girl, but it works relatively well. Those who actually get to show their real faces are collectively fine, but none of them elevate the film overall.

There are undoubtedly some Avatar superfans for which Fire and Ash will move the larger story forward in significant ways. For anyone else, though, the film is a demonstration of both the good and bad sides of Cameron. As he’s proven for 40 years, his visuals are (almost) beyond reproach, but the lack of a story that sticks with you long after you’ve left the theater keeps the film from being truly memorable.

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Avatar: Fire and Ash opens in theaters on December 19.

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