When Iain Webb, who took over the artistic direction of the Sarasota Ballet in 2007, is brainstorming programming possibilities for a new season, he confesses he often channels his excess creative energy into moving the furniture and re-hanging pictures in his office or dusting some of the 3,500 dance books that line the shelves of his home study.

One can only imagine the amount of rearranging that must have gone into coming up with the wide-ranging repertoire for the company’s 2026-2027 season—its 20th under Webb’s leadership—which the director, who does not choreograph himself, revealed to his dancers and donors at a recent cocktail hour soiree.

The upcoming season will feature 16 ballets from 13 choreographers and eight company premieres. It includes everything from a piece by today’s hottest ballet choreographer, Alexei Ratmansky, to a nostalgic revisiting of several Sir Frederick Ashton works that Webb once danced with his wife, assistant director Margaret Barbieri, at the Sadlers Wells Royal Ballet. Company premieres by some of the ballet world’s most significant living choreographers will be performed, as well as treasured classics like Romeo and Juliet.

“Twenty years ago, no one had heard of The Sarasota Ballet and they certainly didn’t know a gentleman called Sir Frederick Ashton,” says Webb, whose personal relationship with the renowned British choreographer, who died in 1988, led him to make Ashton’s ballets the trademark of his company. “When I got here we were the underdogs and I worked to bring the company up. So Fred got the company on the map, but it’s because of what we’ve done that we’ve been able to achieve.”

Though reviving and replicating Ashton’s ballets with precision and authenticity may have been the company’s ticket to international recognition, the new season underscores the depth and breadth of the diverse and challenging repertoire it is now capable of showcasing.

“Let’s be honest here. How many of you roll your eyes and go, ‘Here he goes on again about the choreographers of the past,’” says Webb, an avid, if not obsessive, ballet historian. “And how many times have I said, ‘We were so fortunate, Margaret and I, working with all these legends who are no longer here. But what about the dancing of today?”

There will be plenty of that in the season to come, with premieres by several acclaimed choreographers of the present ballet world, starting with Ratmansky, the New York City Ballet’s artist in residence. Webb says he was introduced to the choreographer “quite a few years ago” by Sarasota Ballet’s executive director, Joe Volpe, former general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, but at the time he didn’t feel the company was ready to perform the work of “the greatest choreographer of today.”

“I just felt, ‘Not yet,’” Webb says. “But this is the company that can do it, that can do justice to the master’s works, of which I hope this will be the first of many to come.”   

Ratmansky’s Pictures at an Exhibition will be on the bill for the company’s second program in November, paired with Lyric Pieces by another heralded contemporary choreographer, Jessica Lang, and Solitaire, by the late Kenneth MacMillan. The company has an established relationship with Lang—she is their current artist in residence—and has performed Lyric previously, but the MacMillan work, which Webb and his wife danced during their own careers, is a company premiere, precipitated by MacMillan’s widow encouraging Webb to “do what you’re doing for Fred [Ashton], for Kenneth.”

Webb assured the dancers that Ratmansky has promised he will do his best to come to Sarasota to conduct the final rehearsals of his ballet.

The season will kick off in late summer/early fall, with a portion of the company embarking on an out-of-town tour, about which Webb would reveal nothing more.

“I’m not allowed to tell you what it is,” he says. “I’m not allowed to tell you anything about it except that it’s in New York.”

The company has previously appeared multiple times at the Joyce Theater in New York City, as well as at New York’s City Center.

As a tribute to the director’s anniversary, the first program in Sarasota, in late October, will bring back Wolfgang for Webb which choreographer Dominic Walsh created—to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—to commemorate Webb’s first season as director in 2007. It will be part of a triple bill that includes the company premiere of Gemma Bond’s Manner, a reworking of the first piece she ever created, marking Bond’s fifth time working with the company. A quartet of Ashton “divertissements”—brief pieces or excerpts from larger works—will complete the program.

Program three, which Webb says he crafted “for Margaret,” includes Two Pigeons, the first Ashton ballet he presented in Sarasota and one which he and his wife danced together during their stage careers. In considering what to pair with the two-act ballet, Webb settled on a company premiere of Christopher Wheeldon’s Within the Golden Hour, because Barbieri commissioned the first work by the now-acclaimed British choreographer when he was just starting out.

In late January 2027, program four combines a George Balanchine work the company has previously performed, Donizetti Variations, with a Paul Taylor ballet it has not—Mercuric Tidings. The remainder of the program features two company premieres by Ashley Page, the former director of the Scottish Ballet: Walking in the Heat and The Pump Room.  

For its annual hosting of an outside company, the Paul Taylor Dance Company will return  in February 2027. The company last appeared here as guests of The Sarasota Ballet in 2020, when they performed Taylor’s Brandenburgs, staged by former Taylor dancer Michael Trusnovec. Webb calls Mercuric Tidings, which Trusnovec will stage for the coming season, “Brandenburgs on steroids.”

“It is non-stop,” Webb says. “Everything you could possibly think of as Paul Taylor, every sort of style of his, everything that you know, it’s in this ballet.”

Last year, the company premiered Ashton’s 1955 full-length version of Romeo and Juliet, which had originally been planned for 2020 but was postponed due to the Covid pandemic. Webb says the company recently acquired the rights to perform the ballet “in perpetuity,” so it will return again for program six next March.

“As long as we’re here, we can do it," he says.

To conclude the anniversary season, Webb has programmed a triple bill of traditional narrative classics, including the company premiere of "The Kingdom of the Shades" from La Bayardere by the choreographic "father of ballet,” Marius Petipa. The Rake’s Progress by Dame Ninette de Valois—in which the “mother of  British ballet” and first director of the Royal Ballet skewers 18th-century English society by depicting the reckless journey of a wayward heir as he falls from grace to ruin—is also on the bill. The program concludes with the return of Antony Tudor’s Gala Performance, a satire about three fiercely competitive ballerinas.

“It’s probably the best season we have ever had,” says Webb, directing his comments toward the company’s dancers. “You guys have performed at the most extraordinary, high standard and it’s been a season about the company.

“And this next season is exactly that," he continues. "It’s about family, it’s about The Sarasota Ballet, it’s about Sarasota itself. People are literally continually watching what we do now and I think this is a flagship to show what a great company this is.”