Entertainment

TITAS, which for 25 years has been entertaining Dallas with some of the world's most acclaimed touring companies in dance and music, will move downtown to the new Dallas Center for the Performing Arts for its 2009-10 season, leaving behind longtime home McFarlin Auditorium at Southern Methodist University.

"The building of the performing arts center is really putting Dallas on the map as a city that takes the arts seriously," says Charles Santos, executive director of TITAS. "For us, the final piece in the cultural puzzle is the season TITAS presents."

Bill Lively, president and CEO of the performing arts center, says that, as the organization he heads draws closer to reaching its fundraising goal, programming – filling the dates at each of four venues – becomes more critical.

The center will consist of the Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House, where most of the TITAS shows will take place, the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre, Annette Strauss Artist Square and City Performance Hall. It's scheduled to open in October 2009.

Robert Bobo, director of media relations at SMU, says he hopes McFarlin can continue to host as many as four shows a year for TITAS. And although Mr. Santos did not specify a number, he says TITAS shows will occasionally take place on the campus.

Mr. Santos says that, while TITAS' primary home will be the opera house, he hopes to use other venues in the complex. Past TITAS shows have featured the American Ballet Theatre, Mark Morris Dance Company, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Pilobolus, France's Lyon Opera Ballet, KODO Drummers of Japan and Twyla Tharp.

"McFarlin has come a long way," says Mr. Santos, "but this gives us a brand-new, world-class opera house in which to perform the majority of our shows. It was an opportunity we could not pass up."

Slots for the center's opening season of 2009-10 are filling rapidly, says Mr. Lively, who notes that $260 million has been raised toward the $275 million goal that marks what he calls the first phase of the fundraising effort. He says the number of donors giving at least $1 million each has reached 108.