San Angelo Civic Ballet Preps to Move Into New Arts Center

The San Angelo Civic Ballet is poised to move into the Performing Arts Center this weekend. The Performing Arts Center is a project involving artists and businesses throughout San Angelo that is on the brink of completion.

Tanya Pfluger, Executive Director of Angelo Civic Ballet, noted that the ballet is waiting only for the Certificate of Occupancy from the city before they move in. This certificate indicates the building has passed all inspections and is ready to be occupied.

“[The new Arts Center] is a blessing for San Angelo Civic Ballet,” Pfluger said. “It means the end of searching for performance venues every season. It answers our need to expand into additional dance studios for ballet instruction. [The Center] also allows us to open up additional openings to the community through our community classes.”

Services the Center offers will include an auditorium as well as space for a black box theatre and rehearsal rooms. Furthermore, the ballet will have its own space, which will consist of six dance studios, a Pilates studio, dressing rooms, and more. This space will be largely expanded from the place the ballet currently uses.

“These studios are set up in a much better way for training students,” said Marketing Director for Angelo Civic Ballet Sara Beth Terral. “[They will] allow us to teach a lot more community classes, to include more classes that we weren’t able to provide before because we didn’t have the space. It’ll enable us to grow the number of students that we can serve because of the space, and it’ll be just a really great, creative environment for our students to work in.”

According to Terral, the ballet has been one of the founding members of the group that conceived the plans for the Center, the Performing Arts Coalition, from the very beginning of the project. This group of artists and community leaders worked together to craft the plan for the Center and collect funding for it.

The Performing Arts Coalition chose to renovate the City Hall Auditorium for use by performing artists in the community. Additionally, the coalition chose to repurpose an abandoned Coca Cola warehouse across the street from the auditorium in order to provide a venue for smaller scale performances. This venue became the Performing Arts Center.

“[The Center] has been a really long time coming, and we’re so excited to finally see it coming to fruition,” Terral said.

Terral told San Angelo LIVE! that a dancer from the national ballet will come to teach the San Angelo Civic Ballet in August and the ballet will offer their regular classes when school starts. Furthermore, the ballet will welcome the public to view the new space in September or October, in what Terral called “a housewarming for our new space.”

“We just hope people will come by our building once we move in,” Terral said. “It’ll be a really great space to perform.”

Terral explained how the ballet has had to “jump around” from theatre to theatre. After this space is opened up, the much larger City Hall auditorium will host performances for art organizations in the city. Terral expressed hopes for the auditorium to attract visiting performers as well.

“[The auditorium] is going to hopefully bring a lot of great performances in, and it’ll allow local arts groups to reach more people,” Terral said. “We’re just really excited about the move. I hope everyone comes and sees what we’re doing.”

In December, the ballet will be hosting its 34^th annual Nutcracker. Furthermore, the ballet will be showcasing its Children’s Story ballet in the spring. In May, the ballet will offer a choreography driven show as well as a student showcase. Specifics will be announced, Terral said, sometime in August.

“We feel extremely blessed that our community has rallied and seen this project through to fruition,” Pfluger said. “We are super excited about the move and the performance capabilities in this new space.”

For more about the Performing Arts Center, check out San Angelo LIVE!’s previous article about renovated buildings in San Angelo. To read about another arts program in San Angelo, take a look at LIVE!’s story about Be Theatre and its plans for the Performing Arts Center.