Houston Ballet is America’s fifth largest ballet company with an ensemble of 59 dancers. The company performs in downtown Houston at the Wortham Theater Center, and opened Houston Ballet’s Center for Dance in April 2011, the largest professional dance facility in America. Australian choreographer Stanton Welch AM has served as Artistic Director of Houston Ballet since 2003, revitalizing the company by bringing in new dancers, attracting a top-flight artistic staff, and commissioning many new works. The company’s repertoire includes works by George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Sir Kenneth MacMillan, Sir Frederick Ashton, as well as twenty-first century works by from Christopher Bruce, Jorma Elo, Wayne McGregor, Christopher Wheeldon, and Alexander Ekman. The company has several of Mr. Welch’s works in its repertoire, including spectacular full-length narrative works and classical stagings.

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, Hamburg, Germany, Melbourne, Australia, and in cities large and small across the United States.  Houston Ballet has emerged as a leader in the labor-intensive task of nurturing the creation and development of new full-length narrative ballets.