This weekend at Miller Outdoor Theatre its the Houston Ballet with is annual performances at the outdoor theatre. Audiences will enjoy the incredible athleticism and artistry of the dancers as they perform thrilling moments from some of the Company’s most recognizable and beloved ballets.
Houston Ballet has evolved into a company of 59 dancers with a budget of $33.2 million (making it the United States’ fifth largest ballet company by number of dancers), a state-of-the-art performance space built especially for the company, Wortham Theater Center, the largest professional dance facility in America, Houston Ballet’s $46.6 million Center for Dance which opened in April 2011, and an endowment of just over $70 million (as of January 2017).
Australian choreographer Stanton Welch has served as artistic director of Houston Ballet since 2003, raising the level of the company’s classical technique and commissioning many new works from dance makers such as Christopher Bruce, Jorma Elo, James Kudelka, Trey McIntyre, Julia Adam, Natalie Weir, Nicolo Fonte, and Edwaard Liang. Executive Director James Nelson serves as the administrative leader of the company, a position he assumed in February 2012 after serving as the company’s General Manager for over a decade.
Houston Ballet has toured extensively both nationally and internationally. Over the past fifteen years, the company has appeared in London at Sadler’s Wells, at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, Russia, in six cities in Spain, in Montréal and Ottawa, at The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in New York at City Center and The Joyce Theater, at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris, at The Arts Center Melbourne State Theatre in Melbourne, Australia, in Los Angeles at The Music Center's Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 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.
Writing in Dancing Times in June 2012, dance critic Margaret Willis praised Houston Ballet and highlighted the fact that “During his own tenure, (Stanton) Welch has upped the standard and Houston Ballet now shows off a group of 55 dancers in 
splendid shape. With fast and tidy footwork, they are technically skillful and have strong, broad jumps and expansive, fluid movements. The dancers’ musicality shines through their work, dancing as one with elegance and refinement – and they are a handsome bunch too!...if ballet were an Olympic sport, see Houston Ballet well on the way to achieving gold.”
Houston Ballet Orchestra was established in the late 1970s and currently consists of 61 professional musicians who play all ballet performances at Wortham Theater Center under music director Ermanno Florio.
Houston Ballet’s Education and Outreach Program has reached approximately 45,884 Houston area students (as of January 2017). Houston Ballet’s Academy has over a thousand students and has had five academy students win awards at the prestigious international ballet competition the Prix de Lausanne, with one student winning the overall competition in 2010.
Born and brought up in Swindon in the UK, Hayward’s interest in music started when he was five years old and bequeathed with his grandfather’s collection of 78 rpm recordings. Having taught himself to play the ukulele, Hayward soon progressed to guitar and by his early teens he was playing in local groups. Upon leaving school at 17 he 
answered an advertisement in the Melody Maker newspaper and successfully auditioned for UK rock and roll hero Marty Wilde. Hayward credits Wilde with encouraging him to become a songwriter; he made several recordings with the ‘Wilde Three’ and appeared with them at the London Palladium.
Once he established himself as a songwriter in his own right, he joined the Moody Blues in the summer of 1966. Hitting his stride immediately with the single “Fly Me High,” he followed it up with the hit songs “Nights in White Satin” and “Tuesday Afternoon” from the seminal album Days of Future Past. The Moody Blues would go on to sell 70 million albums worldwide, which includes 18 platinum and gold LPs. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.
Although the Moodies continued to record and tour at the highest level, Hayward also found time to create several solo albums such as Songwriter, Night Flight, Moving Mountains and The View From the Hill. He hit the Top Ten globally in 1978 with “Forever Autumn” – created for Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds album. Hayward then took to the stage – for five years, from 2005 – 2010, and starred in its spectacular live stadium production.
