New Center of Dance opens next spring

Even in tough times, Houston Ballet thinks big

The sleek glass and black granite six-story building, located downtown with an overhead walkway to the Wortham Theater Center, will be the largest of its kind in the country, with nine studios and a black box dance lab.

Now in the summer of 2010, in the sputtering recovery of the Great Recession 2008 with the stock market struggling to reach the level at which it was at in 2004, we are asked to reflect on the state of the arts in Houston. No one would be surprised to hear that the last three years have not been easy, nor do we expect the current and future years to be a breeze either.

At Houston Ballet, we have seen that the income over the last three fiscal years (ending June 30, 2008, 2009 and 2010) has remained relatively constant, while costs of doing business continue to rise. This means we have had to find ways to provide the same quality of performances and services without increasing overall expenses.

One unfortunate result has been a pay freeze for non-union employees for two years in a row. This has been a real burden on our employees. We have also found less expensive ways to produce the same high level of production and performance.

Houston Ballet is building a new state of the art facility in downtown Houston, across the street from the Wortham Theater Center, to house the ballet’s rehearsal facilities, production and administrative offices, wardrobe shop, physical therapy department and a dormitory for upper level out-of-town students.

In 2005 we began the strategic planning for a new facility to replace our current building on West Gray where we have been since 1984. This strategic plan was developed long before there was any hint of the looming economic crisis. We committed to buy the land in downtown early in 2007 and commenced a combined building and endowment fundraising campaign. In May of 2007 Houston Ballet sold its facility on West Gray and completed the purchase of the land for the new building.

Fortunately, a number of the major commitments for the construction of the new building were made before the onslaught of the economic crisis, but fundraising became much more difficult in the fall of 2008 and 2009. However, the board commitment to move forward with this project was firm, and there was a deadline to move out of the facilities on West Gray. Houston has a tradition of moving forward in tough times, and the building of the Wortham Theater Center and the Menil Collection in the midst of the oil bust are prime examples of this attitude. Therefore construction of our new Center for Dance commenced on July 15, 2009. It is scheduled to open next spring.

There have been benefits in moving forward with construction, especially in cost savings in steel and concrete prices which have been $3 million less than originally estimated. Also, this project has provided jobs to scores of construction personnel in the Houston area, with over 350,000 hours of employment being provided.

Interestingly, two other ballet companies in the United States were faced with the issue of whether to move forward with new buildings. Kansas City Ballet began renovations in the fall of 2009 of the 1914 Union Station Power House to become their new home, the Todd Bolender Center. Pennsylvania Ballet in Philadelphia closed on a piece of property in the summer of 2007 to house their company and school but have postponed plans for their building because of the recession’s impact.

Our view is that the arts scene in Houston will continue to be vibrant and vital to the economy of the city and to the quality of life.

Cecil C. Conner is managing director of Houston Ballet

The new Houston Ballet Center for Dance is expected to be completed in early spring.

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Movie Review

New Pixar film Elio is fun but falls short of Disney's top tier

Photo courtesy of Pixar

Elio (Yonas Kibreab) and Glordon (Remy Edgerly) in Elio.

Pixar has done a ton of different things in the 28 feature films they’ve released over the past 30 years, but the one they’d never done is deal with aliens (and, no, the alien toys in Toy Story don’t count). Now they’re going where many storytellers have gone before, but in their own unique way, in the new film Elio.

Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) is a space fanatic who has recently lost both of his parents in an unnamed event. His Aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña) is now his guardian, and because she happens to be a member of the U.S. Space Force, Elio finds himself tantalizingly close to communications from space. With a desire to be abducted by aliens for both curiosity and sentimental reasons, Elio sends a message into space, hoping for some kind of response.

He gets that and more when a ship full of multiple types of beings takes him into space, believing him to be a leader instead of a child. An encounter with a hostile force led by Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett) gives Elio both a new friend, Grigon’s son Glordon (Remy Edgerly), and responsibility for maintaining peace during an unexpected galactic crisis.

Pixar has not typically followed the route of many Disney movies of giving their child protagonist the trauma of dead parents, and doing so here is the first of a few minor missteps. Having Olga be his mom instead of his aunt would have altered their dynamic, but only slightly. While Elio is shown to miss his parents, his major focus is on making contact with aliens. Since the film only briefly deals with his grief, it would have been better served by excising it altogether.

For the most part, the film is goofy, with Elio’s enthusiasm for aliens matched by the oddness of the creatures he meets in space. The filmmakers - there are three credited directors and three credited writers - seem to have taken inspiration from sea creatures and Pixar’s own history, as the main bad guy emulates Mike and Sully’s boss from Monsters, Inc. Almost every character in the film is heightened to a degree that makes for funny situations, but not as much sentimentality as other Pixar offerings.

Surprisingly, especially since the film ends with a voiceover from notable astronomer Carl Sagan, the filmmakers play fast and loose with real-life science. Elio’s journeys to and from the alien spaceship are treated as close-to-instantaneous trips, even involving portals directly to Earth. The idea of the story doesn’t allow them to delve into things like relativistic time dilation, but there still could have been other scientific references to keep the story aboveboard.

There are very few stars to be found among the film’s voice cast other than Saldaña and Garrett, who are each fine if unmemorable. Kibreab and Edgerly are given many more scenes than anyone else, and they each do a great job of bringing out both the joy and naivete of their characters. Some lesser-known actors like Jameela Jamil, Atsuko Okatsuka, and Brendan Hunt show up in minor roles, but they don’t stand out in any way.

The story and characters in Elio are sweet and fun, but the film as a whole falls well short of the top tier Pixar movies. The filmmakers could have gone many different directions with a story about a boy who wants to be abducted by aliens, and the way they chose ended up being innocuous and less than compelling.

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Elio opens in theaters on June 20.

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