Saturday, 23 December 2017

This Weekend’s Open House Listings In El Paso

EL PASO, TX —Everyone loves starting off the new year with a clean slate, but it wold feel good to start it off in a new home too.

If you’re looking to find that new home in 2018, why not let the pros handle it and start with the open house listings on realtor.com.

Open house events are a great way to find the home you really want without wasting your time going house to house.

Take a look at the open houses in and near El Paso listed by our partners at realtor.com.

Would you like real estate listings and open house events delivered right your inbox? Sign up for the free Patch.com/texas newsletter for your area.

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Wednesday, 13 December 2017

Moscow Ballet’s ‘Nutcracker’ to feature young area dancers in El Paso performances

Each holiday season, the Plaza Theatre becomes a place where Christmas magic happens.

Sugar plum fairies, snowflakes and mice come to life. Life-sized matrushka dolls reveal dancing moors. A nutcracker becomes a prince.

They are all part of the Moscow Ballet’s Great Russian Nutcracker. The internationally acclaimed dance troupe will perform the holiday classic at 3 and 7 p.m. Dec. 23 and at noon Dec. 24 at Downtown’s Plaza Theatre.

Not only does the ballet feature renowned dancers from Russia, Ukraine and other Eastern European countries, it features many talented, young dancers from Las Cruces and Alamogordo, as well.

More: Steve Aoki takes Kolony Tour to El Paso County Coliseum with special guest Designer

Moscow Ballet performer Romana Dumanska travelled to dance studios in Southern New Mexico earlier this year to audition young performers and prepare them for the show.

"It’s a lot of work," the Ukrainian-born dancer said during a phone interview before a performance in Indiana. "They have 2 or 4 days to learn the choreography and 8 weeks of rehearsal."

Area dance students auditioned at the Las Cruces School of Dance and Music and the Alamogordo Academy of Ballet in October. The studios are owned by Monique Foster. More than 30 students were cast in roles of party children, mice, snowflakes, snow maidens and others, to perform alongside the 40-plus professional ballerinas and dancers in the Moscow Ballet.

Ukrainian-born dancer Romana Dumanska is a performer and audition director with the Moscow Ballet.

"We worked with the teacher, Monica," Dumanska said. "All the kids were great. It’s a new thing for them. It’s really interesting for them to be able to perform with dancers from the other side of the world. I think they feel so special because of the audition and all the roles are really important to the show."

Dumanska, who dances in the show with the snowflakes, has been a member of the Moscow Ballet, travelling, performing and auditioning children for about a year.

"I come, audition kids for about two hours, work with them and spend a day doing rehearsal," Dumanska said. "We record the choreography and then the teachers rehearse with them."

By the time the ballet returns to town, all of the performers are expected to know their choreography.

Prior to joining the Moscow Ballet in the U.S., Dumanska was a ballet teacher at the Lviv School of Classical and Modern Ballet in Ukraine. She won first place for her solo performance of "Napoli" in the International Ballet and Contemporary Dance Competition in Lecce, Italy; was a finalist at the 2017 international Dance Competition in Spoleto, Italy; and was a finalist in the 2015 and 2016 Kiev Grand Prix International Ballet Competition. She has been dancing professionally since 2014, after graduating from the Lviv State Ballet School.

While dancing is Dumanska’s first love, she also gets joy from teaching dance to young students.

"The kids are really excited," Dumanska said. "I love the feeling when you see them see their costumes for the first time. (Moscow Ballet’s) costumes are beautiful and expensive and sparkly. The kids are really excited about that. They can feel the audience when they go out on stage. Kids are inspired by that and it’s a big maturation for them."

Now in its 25th year, the Moscow Ballet’s yearly Great Russian Nutcracker tour features 200 hand-sewn costumes created by one of the oldest theatrical shops in Russia. The costumes were recently renovated about two years ago. The show also features five hand-painted backdrops designed by the concept designer of the hit musical movie "La La Land," Carl Sprague.

The Great Russian Nutcracker also features scenes and characters not seen in other Nutcracker productions, such as the Russian Troika Sleigh and the Dove of Peace, created by two dancers, each with one 20-foot wing.

More: Gather your friends and family, popular Fred Loya Christmas lights show kicks off soon

Dumanska said that touring with the Moscow Ballet has been unlike any of her other experiences as a professional dancer.

"The Moscow Ballet is a big professional group and everyone has a good level of (expertise)," Dumanska said. "You see a lot of American cities and learn the culture and speak with people. (Americans) are so sweet. It’s nice to give something and take something, emotionally. Audiences are really thankful and you get to see the kids improve and do what they love."

Dave Acosta may be reached at 546-6138; dacosta@elpasotimes.com; @Chuy_Vuitton on Twitter.

Make plans

What: Moscow Ballet’s Great Russian Nutcracker

When: 3 and 7 p.m. Dec. 23 and noon Dec. 24

Where: Plaza Theatre, Downtown

Tickets; $28-$175; Plaza Theatre Box Office, Ticketmaster outlets, 800-745-3000, ticketmaster.com, nutcracker.com

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Sunday, 3 December 2017

El Paso’s largest garment factory gets new CEO

El Paso’s largest garment factory, which employs mostly people with physical and mental disabilities, has hired Luis Alvarez as its new CEO. Wochit

Luis Alvarez brings 35 years of manufacturing expertise to ReadyOne, which mostly employs workers with disabilities

Luis Alvarez was enjoying semi-retirement in San Antonio after a 35-year career in the manufacturing industry, including managing factories in Mexico for several years, when he took a big detour to El Paso.

He’s the new chief executive officer of ReadyOne Industries, which operates El Paso’s largest garment factory and other smaller enterprises.

It’s one of El Paso’s largest private employers with about 1,100 employees, and is the city’s largest employer of people with mental and physical disabilities. It mostly makes uniforms and other garments for U.S. military branches.

Alvarez’s first day on the job at the not-for-profit company was Nov. 27.

Since March, the 56-year-old Alvarez was in semi-retirement mode, but kept his hand in business by sitting on boards of companies in China, San Francisco. and Denver, and doing business consulting for those companies. That took him on recent trips to China, Asia and Europe, he said. He was living a life he’d dreamt about, he said.

"I was having fun, it was exciting,and everything," Alvarez said recently during an interview in his new office at ReadyOne’s East El Paso headquarters . "I guess in a way, though, I missed the day-to-day responsibility of running a large company."

He left his job in March as president of Lancer Corp., a large, Japanese-owned manufacturer of soda fountain machines with annual sales of about $200 million and about 1,500 employees worldwide, including at factories in San Antonio, Australia, India, Belgium, and Mexico. Its main customers were Coca-Cola and Pepsi, he said.

He worked as an executive at San Antonio-based Lancer for 11 years, including seven years as president, and helped improve its manufacturing processes and grow the company, he said.

ReadyOne Industrie’ headquarters and main garment factory is located at 1414 Ability Drive in East El Paso.

In August, a head hunter called him about the ReadyOne CEO job.

He liked what he saw at ReadyOne and liked the idea of working for a company with the mission to employ people with disabilities.

“It’s a feel-good thing,” he said. It also brought him back to the large-company environment he missed.

Gary Hedrick, former El Paso Electric CEO who is chairman of the ReadyOne board of directors, said a national search firm found 20 candidates for the ReadyOne CEO job, and the board narrowed that to five finalists.

The board unanimously picked Alvarez because of his “rich background” in various manufacturing companies and because of his “cultural fit,” Hedrick said

“He is bilingual, and we thought he’d understand this community better than some of the other candidates,” Hedrick said.

Alvarez grew up in San Diego, where he did a lot of surfing. He now likes to swim, bike, and run.

He spent some of his early school years in Tijuana, Mexico, and he lived in the Mexican towns of Puebla and Leon with his Mexican-born wife and their two children, now in college, for five years when he managed automotive-bumper factories in Mexico for the French company Plastic Omnium.

His family has lived in San Antonio the last 11 years.

He replaces Tony Martinez, an El Paso lawyer who served as CEO for just over three years. He left in February for personal reasons, and was temporarily replaced by Tom Ahmann, a garment industry veteran who came out of retirement to serve several stints as ReadyOne CEO over the last 10 years.

Alvarez’s salary wasn’t disclosed. But Hedrick said he will be paid more than Martinez, who, according to Internal Revenue Service documents filed by ReadyOne, had total compensation of about $266,300 in 2015, the latest available information.

Ahmann, who was on ReadyOne’s CEO selection committee, said it will be easy for Alvarez to pick up the skills for government contracting and running a company aimed at hiring mostly people with physical and mental disabilities. Alvarez’s manufacturing and marketing expertise is what’s valuable, he said.

Alvarez comes to the company just as it picked up $90 million in new government contracts to make military uniforms. That’s expected to more than double ReadyOne’s sales next year from this year’s estimated $67 million, Ahmann said.

The company in October announced it was hiring 500 people due to the new contracts, and so far has hired only about 100 people because it’s difficult to find workers in El Paso’s current low-unemployment environment, Ahmann said.

Besides the company’s not-for-profit division, which employs the bulk of its workforce, it also has a for-profit division, named Roicom, which does work for a jean maker and the U.S. Postal Service. Roicom workers do not have to disabilities.

Juanita Ramirez works on a military jacket at ReadyOne Industries’ garment factory in East El Paso. She has worked at the company for 13 years.

Both divisions operate garment factories — the not-for-profit at 1414 Ability Drive, and the smaller, for-profit factory at 12100 Esther Lama Drive in East El Paso. Both factories will be involved with the new military garment contracts, Ahmann has said.

ReadyOne also operates a box-making operation at 11460 Pellicano Drive with about 100 employees, and a small call center with about 15 employees, which include both disabled and regular workers.

"We sell boxes for Juárez maquilas now, and there’s possible growth opportunities" by getting more companies in the maquiladora, or manufacturing sector, in Juárez and other parts of Mexico, to buy ReadyOne-made boxes for their products, Alvarez said.

"Part of my function is to grow the business," and create more employment, Alvarez said. "We have plenty of space and capacity to do more."

He’s a certified lean-manufacturing teacher, and plans to implement a "cost of waste initiative" at ReadyOne in the future, he said.

"Part of being lean is to look for cost reductions without affecting employment," Alvarez said. "People think leans means cost cutting, but lean’s first priority is customer satisfaction. Once you have satisfied customers, you can grow."

Vic Kolenc may be reached at 546-6421; vkolenc@elpasotimes.com; @vickolenc on Twitter.

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