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2025–2026 Season: ELEVATE
Novus Contemporary Ballet proudly announces its 2025–2026 season, ELEVATE – a bold, evocative program that celebrates the power of dance to connect, challenge, and transform. Across a curated mix of classics reimagined, world premieres, and boundary-pushing contemporary works, ELEVATE invites audiences to explore the art of movement in new and unexpected ways.
Under the artistic direction of Meredith Ventura, Novus continues its mission to expand the possibilities of ballet and contemporary performance – embracing innovation, championing emerging voices, and honoring the deep emotional impact of live dance.
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Winter SuiteWinter 2025 – Repertory
Venue & Dates:
Santa Barbara, CA – December 6, 2025
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Alice in WonderlandSpring 2026 – Outreach Programming
Venue & Dates:
Schools through South Santa Barbara County, Spring 2026
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The LabSpring 2026 – Labs & Showings
Venue & Dates:
Santa Barbara, CA – March 28, 2026
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ElevateSpring 2026 – Repertory
Venue & Dates:
Santa Barbara, CA – June 5-7, 2026
Winter 2025Winter Suite
Winter Suite brings together the artists of Selah Dance Collective and Novus Contemporary Ballet for a one-night-only performance that blends contemporary repertory with a fresh reimagining of the second act of The Nutcracker. Created on a fast creative turnaround, the program highlights the dancers’ versatility, musicality, and collaborative spirit, offering audiences an intimate experience of both new choreography and re-envisioned holiday classics. The evening features original contemporary works by Artistic Director Meredith Ventura alongside a modern retelling of the beloved “Snow” and “Kingdom of the Sweets” sequences.
From bold ensemble moments to atmospheric solos and duets, Winter Suite moves between tradition and invention, honoring the recognizable heart of The Nutcracker while transforming it through contemporary expression. Set in the intimate black-box setting of Center Stage Theater, Winter Suite invites audiences to experience the magic, emotion, and immediacy of live dance at the start of the winter season.
December 6, 2025
Center Stage Theater
Dates
Winter 2026The Lab
Novus Lab: 2026 is an intimate studio event featuring short works created and performed by the dancers of Novus Contemporary Ballet. Designed as a choreographic laboratory, the Lab invites audiences into the room where ideas begin – offering a rare look at process, experimentation, and the dancer as author.
This is not a traditional performance. The pieces shared in Novus Lab are drafts, studies, and works-in-progress: bold beginnings, open questions, and emerging choreographic voices. Come witness contemporary ballet in motion – before it becomes “finished.”
Dates
March 28, 2026
Spring 2026Alice in Wonderland
Alice invites audiences to tumble down the rabbit hole and into a world where logic slips, bodies transform, and imagination reigns. Inspired by Alice in Wonderland, this bold new ballet from Novus Contemporary Ballet reimagines Lewis Carroll’s iconic tale through a contemporary lens—one that embraces curiosity, absurdity, and the pleasure of not quite knowing where you are.
Featuring original choreography by Meredith Ventura and Elianne Holt, with imaginative visual design, Alice is a theatrical experience that blurs the line between fantasy and self-discovery. Both whimsical and unsettling, playful and profound, this production invites audiences of all ages to reconsider what it means to grow, to question, and to wander off the expected path.
Spring 2026
Spring 2026ELEVATE
Concluding the 2025–2026 season, ELEVATE is an expansive mixed repertory program that embodies Novus Contemporary Ballet’s core artistic values: innovation, collaboration, and the continual reimagining of ballet for our time. Featuring a curated selection of contemporary works by established and emerging choreographers, this program offers audiences a multifaceted evening of movement that is bold, visceral, and deeply human.
Each work in ELEVATE explores the body as both an expressive instrument and a site of inquiry – where technique meets risk, precision meets instinct, and classical line is transformed through a contemporary sensibility.
More than a showcase of individual pieces, ELEVATE is a conversation across aesthetics and ideas. Themes of transformation, resilience, connection, and power ripple through the evening, inviting audiences to consider how movement can articulate what words cannot.
As the culminating performance of the season, ELEVATE reflects Novus Contemporary Ballet’s commitment to artistic risk-taking and its investment in the future of the art form. It is a celebration of possibility: of dancers as collaborators, of choreography as living research, and of the theater as a space for shared experience and collective reflection.
ELEVATE invites audiences to witness ballet not as a fixed tradition, but as a continually evolving practice – one that rises, responds, and reaches toward what comes next.
June 5-7, 2026
Center Stage Theater
Dates