Photos by Jhane Hoang
Styling by René Garza
Models Charlie Ferguson, Sarah Wohlschlaeger
Hair and makeup by Tonya Riner
Photo assistance by Collin Kelly
Styling assistance by Tyler Treadwell
Shot on Location Downtown, at Dancie Perugini Ware Public Relations in the Niels Esperson Building
At Janelle Alexis, we not only aspire to make each and every guest to feel and look their very best, we want everyone to feel like part of our amazing crazy family. We laugh, we cry, we dance, but most of all we value each other and every single guest that walks through the door. When visiting us, you are always greeted by our little ESA’s Gizmo and Luna, but we are more than just fun! We bring expertise and specialization with hair extensions, color, balayage, mens cuts, keratin treatments, make-up application and updo’s.
Houston’s own Wayne Wilson stars in and helped create Cirque du Soleil’s new ’Songblazers’ show.
Wayne Wilson, who’s been performing in Cirque presentations for more than 20 years — and sometimes also helping create the shows behind the scenes — will be front and center, performing for a hometown crowd for the very first time. “I don’t think I have the words to express how excited I am,” says the longtime performing artist, who grew up in Houston’s North Shore area, graduated from HSPVA with high honors and was soon tapped for his first Cirque role as a college student in Minneapolis.
He says his friends and family have traveled the world to see him work — going even as far away as China. “But the first time to be a home? It feels full circle,” he says. “Something just feels really right about where I am with my career.”
Per his usual role, the now Las Vegas-based Wilson, 41, plays a clown in the new show. He’s been fascinated with physical comedy since he was a kid watching I Love Lucy and The Little Rascals reruns. Of course, at Cirque, it’s a special kind of clowning. “I don’t even wear a nose. It’s a state of being. It’s a state of reflecting the audience back to them, so they recognize and empathize with the clown onstage.
“I love doing theater, and I love doing plays,” he adds. “But with these shows, you really get to put a piece of yourself within the work unlike any other medium.”
Wilson also works in the wings, helping to develop shows like Songblazers as associate show director and comedic concept designer. “I just love the creation of these shows,” he says. “Cirque du Soleil is a beacon for creativity. If you can dream it, they have the tools and resources to help you build it.
“In one show, I wanted to have a pogo stick — 15 feet in the air,” he recalls, still a bit amazed. “And before I knew it, they built a harness and I’m on a winch jumping up and down.”
Songblazers may have the audience jumping around, too. Especially country fans. “It’s a love letter to country music,” says Wilson.
The 24th Cirque du Soleil presentation in Houston will go up at Sugar Land’s Smart Financial Centre for 16 performances, from Aug. 1 to Aug. 11. It boasts a live soundtrack with new music as well as dozens of classic songs from the genre going back generations. “As the crowd grooves to beloved country tunes, they will be entranced by the breathtaking skills of Cirque du Soleil artists, honoring the rich tradition of country music while embracing its evolving spirit,” gushes a Cirque rep. Universal Music Group Nashville presents the show, along with Cirque.
“I’m proud of the work we’ve done,” says Wilson, “and I'm proud of the family I’ve built throughout the years. And I really can’t wait to bring all of them to my mother’s house.”
Indeed, he says his mom, now in Humble, will host a large barbecue for family, neighbors and her son’s Cirque pals. “I think I’m going to rent a van and bring whoever wants to come down to ol’ Sheila’s!”
Houston’s own Wayne Wilson
Besides lots of new and classic music, ’Songblazers’ will feature 'breathtaking acrobatics, awe-inspiring aerial acts and displays of extraordinary strength,’ says a show rep.
Cirque du Soleil’s new country-themed show will be presented at Smart Financial Center in Sugar Land.
’Songblazers’ will open Aug. 1 and run through Aug. 11.
Cirque’s ’Songblazers’ is described as ‘a love letter to country music.’
A detail of Konoshima Okoku's 'Tigers,' 1902
Organized by the Japanese Art Society of America and co-curated by Bradley Bailey, Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao curator of Asian art at the MFAH, this expansive exhibit is installed thematically, rather than chronologically, across several galleries on the upper level of the Caroline Wiess Law Building. The show features more than 150 objects borrowed from 70-plus public and private collections, including several newly discovered masterworks of Japanese art, many of which have never been shown publicly. The curatorial vision here is extraordinary; Meiji Modern will simultaneously reaffirm and explode any preconceived ideas you have about Japanese art.
The exhibit’s title refers to the 50 years of Japan’s Meiji era (1868-1912), named after the country’s first monarch, who ruled from 1867 to his death as Japan transformed itself from an isolationist, feudal country into a nation-state and one of the great powers of the modern world. In a statement, Bailey describes Japan during that time as “one the first non-Western nations seeking to repel colonization by making the case for the integrity of its art and culture.”
But “repel” may be too narrow a word. Throughout the exhibit’s over 150 paintings, woodblock prints, historic photographs, cloisonné enameled vases, bronze sculptures, crystal balls, and folding screens, one sees a sometimes tense, sometimes joyful, sometimes propagandized amalgamation of Japan’s ancient traditions and the Western promise of 19th-century modernity, which included new techniques and concepts in art.
Mitsutani Kunishirō’s European tutelage is apparent in his 1910 watery oil-on-canvas portrait “Flowers,” where a woman, seated outdoors on a wooden veranda, and dressed in a traditional kimono and with two flowers in her lap, strikes a languid pose against a mysterious background of undulating, deep green foliage, like an incongruous underwater garden. It’s a painting that would sit nicely between one of Monet’s “Water Lillies” and John Singer Sargent’s en plein air masterwork, “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.”
Kano Hogai's 'Two Dragons in Clouds,' 1885
'Hell Courtesan,' c. 1900, one of a pair of six-panel screens by Utagawa (Baidō) Kokunimasa
Mitsutani Kunishiro's 'Flowers'
Hashiguchi Goyo's 'Poster for Mitsukoshi'
Gender roles evolved during the Meiji era, and the fashion of the time followed — but the kimono is present in several woodblock prints of women enjoying new freedoms and technologies.
In Shodo Yukawa’s “Telephone Call: A Merchant’s Wife,” an elegant, kimono-clad woman has pushed a pink floor-to-ceiling curtain aside to access a wall telephone, her ear cocked coquettishly toward the handheld receiver. Meanwhile, the men are represented by a bowler hat woven entirely out of bamboo reeds. (You will do a double-take when you see it.)
Other works that will stop you in your tracks include a stunning image of a polar bear made with embroidered silk by an unknown Japanese artist. (The creation of modern zoos in Japan began during the Meiji era.)
And then there’s the woodblock print, “Tokugawa Shogun Viewing Watermelon Fight at Hama Palace”by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, which depicts exactly what the title describes: a churning ocean bay filled with two teams of imperial boatmen swimming furiously as they attempt to grab and collect dozens of floating and super slippery watermelons.